Too Big to Fail [43]
“Can I show it to people here” Weill asked Dimon.
“Absolutely,” Dimon replied. “Can I have a summer job?” Weill was happy to oblige.
After graduating from Harvard Business School, Dimon received offers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers. Weill invited Dimon to his Upper East Side apartment and made his own offer: a position as his assistant at American Express, where Weill was now a top executive after having sold Shearson for nearly $1 billion. “I won’t pay you as much,” Weill told the twenty-five-year-old, “but you’re going to learn a lot and we’re going to have a lot of fun.” Dimon was sold.
Weill and Dimon’s tenure at the company turned out to be brief. Although he once boasted that “the Jews are going to take over American Express!” Weill still found himself thwarted by the WASP hierarchy, unable to cut deals on his own. Increasingly frozen out by his colleagues and the board, he quit as president of American Express in 1985; Dimon, whose talents had been noticed by CEO James Robinson, was asked to stay. Dimon was at a point of in his life where many in the same position might have opted for security; his wife had just given birth to their first child. But he decided to stick with Weill, even though Weill hadn’t yet settled on his next project and had taken space in a small office. As the months wore on and Dimon found himself watching Weill sleep off his martini lunches on their office couch, he wondered if he had made a bad bet. Weill couldn’t seem to get anything off the ground, and Dimon had asked himself whether his mentor had played his last hand.
Then, in the wake of Weill’s failed takeover of Bank of America, two executives at Commercial Credit, a subprime lender based in Baltimore, pitched him and Dimon on buying the company from its parent. Weill put up $6 million of his money to do the deal (Dimon invested $425,000), and the company was spun off, with Weill in charge. Dimon set himself up as the operations man, obsessively cutting costs. A lean-and-mean Commercial Credit became the cornerstone of a new financial empire, one that Weill and Dimon built through more than one hundred acquisitions. In 1988 the pair got their return ticket to Wall Street with the $1.65 billion acquisition of Primerica, the parent of the brokerage firm Smith Barney. A $1.2 billion purchase of Shearson from American Express followed in 1993.
Dimon’s reputation rose alongside Weill’s. They were a team: Weill, the strategist and deal maker; Dimon, more than twenty years his junior, the numbers cruncher and operations whiz. They had moved beyond mentor and protégé to something more like a long-married combative couple. In the Midtown Manhattan offices of Primerica, the chairman and the chief financial officer would argue ferociously, their voices booming down the corridors. In meetings Dimon would roll his eyes whenever he thought Sandy had said something foolish.
“You’re a fucking asshole!” Weill would yell at him.
“No, you’re the fucking asshole!” Dimon shouted back.
By 1996, after a $4 billion deal for Travelers, the company needed someone to run the combined asset-management operations. Weill was quietly pushing Dimon to promote his daughter, Jessica Bibliowicz, then thirty-seven, who was running Smith Barney’s mutual fund business. Dimon and Bibliowicz had known each other since they were teenagers, but she wasn’t considered a top-flight manager, and he had reservations about entrusting her with so powerful a job. A top executive took Dimon aside. “Promote her,” he warned Dimon. “You’re killing yourself if you don’t.” Dimon, however, was not persuaded and told Weill and others that she wasn’t ready for the job; they had better, more experienced executives in line.
The following year Bibliowicz announced