As Wall Street’s top bankers gathered in New York last month to prepare to persuade Elon Musk’s SpaceX to choose them to head its upcoming IPO, one company couldn’t afford to let its star advisors miss out on the bakeoff.
Among the troops of JP Morgan Chase The investment bankers who flew 4,500 miles west to California to pitch SpaceX were the lender’s boss, billionaire CEO Jamie Dimon, a person familiar with the trip told CNBC.
The morning after that pitch meeting, Dec. 19, Mr. Dimon was already back in his usual early Friday morning position. I sat in the lobby of a New York bank, meeting in full view of the thousands of bank employees who passed through the building’s turnstiles.
The past few whirlwind days have underscored the reality of Mr. Dimon’s unique influence over JPMorgan, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization.
Mr. Dimon celebrates his 20th anniversary as CEO this month and remains deeply involved across the vast operations of JPMorgan, the $4.6 trillion giant that spans Wall Street and Main Street. Six executives from investment banking, wealth management, and consumer banking expressed similar views.
That has loomed large over the inevitable questions about Mr. Dimon’s tenure as he approaches 70. For years, Mr. Dimon has maintained, somewhat jokingly, that his retirement is forever five years away. In 2024, he acknowledged for the first time that the field is shrinking.
Will Dimon’s departure as CEO end JPMorgan’s era of dominance?
“Given his track record, anyone else would be downgraded,” said Ben Makovac, a bank board member and investor through his firm, Strategic Value Bank Partners.
“I’m confident someone else could grow into the role and surprise people,” Makowak said. “But there’s no one more qualified to run that bank than Jamie from day one.”
JPMorgan Chase Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon attends a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the company’s new headquarters at 270 Park Avenue in New York City, USA, on October 21, 2025.
Eduardo Muñoz | Reuters
Over the course of 20 years, Dimon acquired small-sized American lenders and used a combination of judgment, paranoia, attention to detail, and broad vision to create a financial behemoth the world had never seen before.
In calm times, it invested aggressively for the future, and in turbulent times like 2008 and 2023, it avoided the pitfalls that consumed other banks and succeeded in acquiring three failed financial institutions.
Over the past 20 years, the bank’s annual net income has increased by more than 500% to $58.5 billion in 2024. The company will report its full-year 2025 results on Tuesday.
Currently, JPMorgan has a market capitalization of about $900 billion, roughly equal to the value of the next three largest U.S. banks combined. bank of america, citygroup and Wells Fargo.
In addition to running JPMorgan, Mr. Dimon has played an outsized role in global finance as a top figure in explaining market fluctuations and new risks, and influencing regulators in policy shifts. The impetus to persuade President Donald Trump to change course on trade policy came in April when Dimon issued a recession warning on a Fox News segment that sparked historic relief rallies.
“It’s just the aura he has, the trust he’s built in the market,” said Fitch Ratings analyst Chris Wolff. “The moment you leave a role, you can’t just take over that role, and your successor doesn’t automatically inherit it. I think that’s the real challenge.”
potential successor
The question of who will succeed Dimon, who was already a cancer survivor when he nearly died from a ruptured aorta in 2020, has been openly debated among investors for more than a decade.
For investors, the most likely candidate to succeed him now is Marianne Lake, the head of the giant consumer bank and former chief financial officer, followed by Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, co-heads of the company’s commercial and investment bank.
Marian Lake, Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase, said:
Jin Li | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Other nominees include Mary Erdoes, head of wealth and asset management, and Jeremy Burnham, chief financial officer.
“If investors were to do a straw poll today, they would probably choose Marianne,” said Brian Foran, an analyst at Trust Bank.
“The running joke is that she’s the human supercomputer when it comes to banking,” Foran said. “Really, the only question mark people have about her is that she’s very analytical. Can she do the ‘so-so’ things that inspire salespeople?”
Mike Mayo, a banking analyst at Wells Fargo, theorized that JPMorgan’s stock could immediately fall 5% if Mr. Dimon were to leave the company abruptly, regardless of his named successor. (The bank announced that Mr. Dimon will continue as chairman after stepping down as CEO.)
This is a somewhat common occurrence on Wall Street for companies with iconic CEOs. When a long-time leader announces his resignation, the stock price premium narrows, at least for a period of time. for example, Berkshire Hathaway Stock prices followed suit. S&P500 After Warren Buffett announced last year that he would step down as CEO,
“I’m never going to quit.”
Asked about CEO succession, JPMorgan executives said Mr. Dimon remains proactive and unlikely to step down anytime soon.
Depending on how long he stays on, that means more junior executives are being developed and evaluated for leadership roles, not necessarily alongside current direct reports like Lake, Petno and Rohabaugh, they told CNBC.
“It’s hard to imagine a day without him,” said one JPMorgan executive, who spoke about his boss on condition of anonymity. “If he stays until he’s 85, the next person to succeed him won’t be his direct report, but probably one or two levels below where he is today.”
“Is he leaving a big void? Yes,” the executive said. “But it’s not fatal. We planned for it, and I think there’s a combination of people that together can produce the same result.”
A commercial bank CEO and former JPMorgan executive who described Mr. Dimon as a mentor also said he didn’t think Mr. Dimon would step down anytime soon.
“Jamie is never going to quit,” said the CEO, who spoke candidly on condition of anonymity. “What else would he do in a position as important as he is now? All his friends are from work. He loves it.”
Still, beyond the day-to-day running of the 318,000-employee company, Mr. Dimon seems intent on building JPMorgan into a future without him.
Traditional value
In recent months, Mr. Dimon oversaw the completion of the bank’s new $3 billion headquarters in midtown Manhattan and announced a $1.5 trillion initiative to strengthen an industry vital to America’s national interests.
And perhaps most importantly, he continues to instill his values into the company’s leadership team.
Last year, at a meeting of 400 JPMorgan executives, Mr. Dimon rattled off a list of once-great companies that had disappeared due to mismanagement. He said the financial industry is particularly vulnerable to this threat because of the temptation to manipulate numbers for short-term gains.
“Travelers blew up. Citi blew up twice. Bear Stearns failed, Lehman failed. I’m here because Bank One ruined a lot of businesses,” Dimon said, referring to JPMorgan’s predecessor.
“When you look at these things, it’s complacency, it’s bureaucracy, it’s arrogance. A lot of it is dishonest numbers. It’s not setting standards,” Dimon said. “These are the cancers that kill businesses.”
No one knows when Mr. Dimon’s last day as CEO will be, except that it’s getting closer. Mr. Dimon hasn’t moved the clock forward any further, even after he revised his standard five-year retirement answer to hint at an earlier retirement.
“As great as he is, he can’t do this forever,” said Jason Goldberg, a banking analyst at Barclays. “Every day that passes brings us closer to the end.”
—CNBC’s Gabriel Cortez contributed to this report.
