Leaked Audio Reveals JP Morgan CEO Going Off on Young Staffers Wanting to Work from Home

DIMON: “A lot of you were on the f**king Zoom and you were doing the following, okay? You know, looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an as*hole the other person is, okay? Not paying attention, not reading your stuff, you know? And if you don’t think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness, it does, okay? And when I found out that people are doing that — you don’t do that at my goddamn meetings. You go to a meeting with me, you got my attention, you got my focus, I don’t bring my goddamn phone, I’m not sending texts to people, okay? It simply doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work for creativity. It slows down decision making. And don’t give me the shit that work from home Friday works. I call a lot of people on Friday. There’s not a goddamn person to get a hold of. But here are the problems, okay, and they are substantial, which is, the young generation is being damaged by this. That may or may not be in your particular staff, but they are being left behind. They’re being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people — in fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. Every area should be looking to be 10%more efficient. If I was running a department for 100 people, I guarantee you if I wanted to, I could run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you. I could do it in my sleep. And the notion of these bureaucracies, ‘I need more people, I can’t get it done,’ no, because you’re filling out requests that don’t need to be done. Your people are going to meetings they don’t need to go to. Someone told me to approve something in Wealth Management that they had to go to 14 committees. I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees, and I feel like firing 14 chairmen of committees. I can’t stand it anymore. Now, you have a choice. You don’t have to work at JP Morgan. So the people of you who don’t want to work at the company, that’s fine with me. I’m not mad at you. Don’t be mad at me. It’s a free country. You can walk with your feet. But this company is going to set our own standards and do it our own way. And I’ve had it with this kind of stuff. I come in, you know, I’ve been working seven days a goddamn week since Covid. And I come in and I’m like, ‘Where’s everybody else?’ They’re here and there and the Zooms, and the Zoomers don’t show up. And people say they didn’t get stuff. So, that’s not how you run a great company. We didn’t build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi-disease sh*t that everybody else does.”