When Jamie Dimon was wheeled into the operating room for emergency heart surgery, he didn’t know whether he would make it out—what he did know was that he had no big regrets in life.
As he turns 70 on Friday, the JPMorgan CEO can safely say he’s had a distinguished career. He has become the face of American banking over his decades-long career—and was even at one point, Wall Street’s savior. He is well-known for navigating the bank nearly unscathed through the 2008 housing crash and for his deft actions in helping prop up the U.S. financial system.
But around six years ago, life handed him a raw deal.
After having already staved off throat cancer a decade prior, Dimon experienced an acute aortic dissection, or a tear in the inner layer of the body’s main artery, and had to rush to the hospital. The condition is rare—only about nine people per 100,000 experience it every year.
“It felt like someone stuck a knife in my heart,” he said in an interview with former Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley, host of Office Hours: Business Edition.
Yet, as the longtime leader of a Wall Street icon, Dimon, faced with his possible demise, thought of his company first.
Dimon called his wife, Judith Kent, before he went into surgery and asked her to call JPMorgan’s general counsel and the lead director on the board to tell them “exactly” what was wrong with him so they could act appropriately. Survival odds for the procedure were around 50-50, and taking no chances, JPMorgan appointed co-CEOs in case he were to die.
But Dimon, despite the odds, was by his own account seemingly calm and even thanked the nurses and doctors preparing to operate on him—he later bought them a new refrigerator and sanitizing machine as a thank-you gift.
‘I love what I do’
When he emerged from the procedure after more than eight hours, Dimon began living more deliberately, although he said he didn’t feel any big regrets or an urge to shift his life path.
“I love what I do, and that didn’t change,” Dimon said.
Despite the health scare, the 70-year-old Dimon has not slowed by a long shot. He has a penchant for waking up before dawn and reading five newspapers before diving into work and as of 2024 was retaking up squash. The same goes for his work life. In 2023, Dimon oversaw JPMorgan’s acquisition of First Republic Bank, which increased its deposits by $92 billion and gave it a significant stock boost. He is also managing the bank as it faces a $5 billion lawsuit from President Donald Trump for allegedly debanking him following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
Dimon in 2024 walked back his often-repeated five year timeline for stepping back from the CEO role, before recommitting last month to being around for “a few years as CEO, and maybe few after that as executive chairman.”
He’ll retire, he told Langley in September, “when they are ready and it’s time for me to go—or some combination of the two.”
A version of this story originally published at Fortune.com on Sept. 27, 2025.
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