Jamie Dimon said he devours five newspapers every morning — and that his first read of the day is The New York Post.
After waking up at 4:30 am, “I read five papers — you’ll be happy to hear — in a very specific form,” the JPMorgan Chase CEO told The Wall Street Journal in a wide-ranging interview on Thursday.
“I flip through The Post, ’cause everyone else does it,” the Wall Street titan began, briefly flashing a conspiratorial smile at somebody off-camera near the close of the 37-minute, video-taped interview.
Dimon said he then goes on to read broadsheets including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and The New York Times — although he noted that the Grey Lady’s business section “isn’t great.” He usually ends his morning reading sessions with the Financial Times for its international news.
“I like reading, I’ll do it for hours in the morning. But then I like to get a little exercise and then go into the office,” added the 68-year-old boss of America’s largest lender — a role he’s held for nearly two decades.
Asked about social media, Dimon said it doesn’t interest him — and noted that he didn’t even have his phone on him during the interview.
“I think people should spend a little bit less time on that and a little more time thinking,” Dimon said. “I’m not on any social media. Every year I test it — I go on for literally for just a week to see what everyone else is doing — Reels and Instagram and Facebook and TikTok — and then I click out of it.”
Elsewhere in the interview with Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, Dimon danced around whether he’s going to retire in the next five years — which he’s been saying for at least the past six years.
“I stopped saying that,” Dimon said, noting that he’ll only plan to step away “when I can no longer give my best and my all.”
In addition, “it’s totally up to the board,” he said, declaring that he “still has the energy and the capability” to run JPMorgan, which reported a modest 6% rise in profit in the first quarter earlier this month following a record 2023 where Wall Street behemoth made nearly $50 billion in profits.
“I still think I’m aging well in terms of — you do gain wisdom as you get older,” Dimon added. “Hopefully I can provide value to my company and my country through this perch.”
Dimon had said earlier in the sit-down that he’s become more deliberate in making a difference in the world since his throat cancer diagnosis in 2014.
“I love my job, I love my family, I love all those things, so nothing really changed that way, but it is a little more deliberate,” Dimon added of his experience with cancer which, at the time of his diagnosis in 2014, was deemed unspecified but “curable.”
Years later, he also had what Tucker described as a “near death” heart surgery to treat an acute aortic dissection, which the Mayo Clinic describes as “a serious condition in which a tear occurs in the inner layer of the body’s main artery.”
“Blood rushes through the tear, … [and] if the blood goes through the outside aortic wall, aortic dissection is often deadly,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
At the time of the surgery in 2020, “when I was being wheeled in the operating room for the dissection, I knew it was like 50/50,” Dimon admitted, revealing that the operation was much more serious than he let on when it took place.
Even so, “I didn’t have any regrets,” added Dimon, who shares three daughters with his wife of more than four decades, Judith Kenth.
Representatives for JPMorgan did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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