Acquired · Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

The Jamie Dimon Interview

July 16, 2025·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

Jamie Dimon describes the Sunday he was fired by his mentor Sandy Weill at Citigroup — told to resign while hosting 100 recruits at his apartment.

"David, we completely blew it." The cold open starts with a goofy regret: the hosts met Jamie Dimon and forgot to ask about JP Morgan's Hamilton and Burr pistols. It is a small miss, but a useful one. That artifact lets Acquired slide from American history into banking history, power, and the way big institutions keep going. The frame is wide on purpose. Dimon enters as a rising Wall Street figure shaped in the 1980s and tested for decades after that. First comes mentorship. The setup follows him working with a mentor through the merger-and-acquisition climb of the 1990s financial world. Then the relationship breaks. He is fired unexpectedly by that same mentor and left searching for what comes next. The 2000 turn gives the episode its hinge. Dimon takes the job of turning around what the hosts call a poorly run Midwestern bank. From there, the story gets bigger fast. The next 25 years become, in the hosts' telling, one of the great runs in banking and corporate history. The surrounding material sounds very Acquired. Even the sponsor segment hangs around institutional knowledge, compliance, governance, deal history, and why those details matter inside professional firms. That fits the main event. The episode cares about the machinery: incentives, rules, relationships, proprietary history, and the systems that outlast any one person's memory. The ending keeps the room open. New listeners get pointed to the Google series, Rolex, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg, and Howard Schultz. Longtime listeners get ACQ2 and the Acquired Slack as the after-hours layer. The pace is unhurried. Banter lets out some air, then the show returns to the longer story of how a banker becomes a case study for institutions.

As heard by us

A banking story told as corporate history, not celebrity gloss.

Acquired treats Jamie Dimon less like a public figure than like a force moving through modern banking, starting with a small but memorable detail: the hosts visit his office and still miss the pair of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr pistols kept in JPMorgan's headquarters.

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Why you'd press play

Jamie Dimon's rise from a Wall Street operator to the architect of JPMorgan Chase, told as a major banking saga.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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