After nearly two decades at the helm of the US’s biggest bank by assets, Jamie Dimon is (as FT dep ed Patrick Jenkins wrote this week) the de facto King of Wall Street.
The JPMorgan boss certainly lives the life of a modern-day financial monarch, which naturally involves racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal jet spending on the company dime.
Here’s how his personal use of corporate aircraft spending has stacked up over recent years, according to JPM’s proxy filings (these refer to the prior year, so eg the 2021 edition covers 2020’s flying):
Putting aside the climate impact of all those air miles, these are simply pretty big money numbers by most regular humans’ standards, although not by the standard of Dimon’s overall compensation or broader US corporate standards. Call it the royal prerogative.
What’s mildly interesting, however, is that Dimon now has a rival within JPM.
When Team Dimon stepped in to acquired First Republic Bank at the start of this month — bringing the US’s second-biggest banking failure to close — they acquired $93.5bn of deposits, $30bn of securities, $173bn of loans, a slew of branches, and one extremely flight-happy chairman.
James H. Herbert, II founded First Republic in the mid-1980s, spending 37 years as its chief executive before shifting to the role of executive chairman last year.
Per First Republic’s own proxy filings (which it files with the FDIC, rather than the SEC), Herbert treasures his non-commercial aircraft expenses even more than Dimon:
FT Alphaville finds it hard to figure out why the boss of a regional US bank needed to fly so much more than the boss of the biggest lender in the world’s biggest economy, and particularly so much during the first year of the pandemic. Perhaps we’re just unimaginative.
Either way, First Republic’s collapse means we didn’t get a new proxy statement this year — and it’s not clear if we’ll ever again find out such specifics about Herbert’s flight spending. But we have to assume he’ll be getting his wings clipped — it’s never wise to overshadow the king.
Further reading— Is this the world’s most pizza-addicted man?— XxXTREMEXxX FLIGHT SIMULATOR [MLG] {{360 VERTICAL PARKING }} N0 NO0BS [NB: contains strobing]
