Marc Rubinstein looks at the hardest job in banking that nobody has yet been given: the one after Jamie Dimon. Dimon is 70 and has run JPMorgan for over 20 years, and in that time the bank has quietly become a machine almost too big to hand to anyone. When he arrived, total assets were about $1.2 trillion; they have since blown past $5 trillion. The annual report grew from 144 pages to 364. Headcount went from 168,847 to 320,560. The bank now sits on roughly $63.7 trillion in notional derivative contracts, $549 billion of trading and available-for-sale securities, and $29 billion of Level 3 assets, the kind so illiquid there is no market price and you have to model the value yourself. The Bank for International Settlements ranks JPMorgan as the single most complex bank on Earth. Dimon has publicly rattled off the qualities his successor will need, flexibility, analytical horsepower, people skills, cultural awareness, curiosity, resilience, and the stamina for endless travel, which reads less like a job description and more like an admission that the role has outgrown any one human. Rubinstein's point: the very scale and complexity that make JPMorgan formidable are also what make succession a genuine risk, not a formality.
Why it matters · JPMorgan is the biggest, most complex bank on Earth, and the man who built that machine is 70. Whether the next CEO can hold $5 trillion together is a real question for anyone who owns the stock or the sector.
Worth asking · JPMorgan's scale and complexity: an unbreakable moat, or a succession risk waiting to bite?