Jamie Dimon, the billionaire head of the U.S.’ biggest bank, lauded Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet and a key part of President Donald Trump’s administration, on Wednesday, squashing a long-running beef between the billionaires’ companies as Dimon becomes the latest billionaire warming to Musk or Trump.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit in 2023.
“The guy is our Einstein,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Dimon told CNBC from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, likening Musk to the legendary physicist Albert Einstein.
Dimon, who referenced Musk’s efforts at the electric and autonomous vehicle firm Tesla, and his private aerospace company SpaceX and brain implant startup Neuralink, added he’d “like to be helpful to him and his companies as much as we can.”
Dimon added that he and Musk “hugged it out” and “settled some of our differences,” seemingly concluding a yearslong row stemming from a legal fight between JPMorgan and Tesla.
JPMorgan announced in November it dropped a $162 million lawsuit against Tesla filed in 2021, arguing the bank did not receive Tesla stock warrants the bank believed it was entitled to in the wake of Musk’s infamous 2018 tweet claiming Tesla secured funding to go private. Tesla also dropped its countersuit last year. “Tesla, um, has a very negative relationship with JPMorgan” and “JPMorgan hate[s] Tesla and me very much,” Musk testified in Delaware court in 2023. Musk told a JPMorgan executive “F— you,” when the bank declined to underwrite leases for Tesla cars, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Dimon follows several other previously adversarial billionaires in apparently making amends with Musk or Trump as the former plays a pivotal role in Trump’s second presidential term. Dimon, who spoke sympathetically about Trump reaching voters upset about “legitimate issues” like “ineffective government” and immigration, was not present at Trump’s inauguration, but several other billionaires previously at odds with Musk or Trump were. Those include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. The bad blood ran deep for that group – Amazon accused Trump of treating Bezos as "his perceived political enemy” in a 2019 lawsuit, Brin called Trump’s 2016 election “deeply offensive” and Trump threatened Zuckerberg with a life in prison. Bezos publicly made nice with Musk last week two months after Bezos refuted Musk’s claims he thought Trump would lose last fall and to sell Tesla stock accordingly. Bezos and Musk exchanged well wishes about their rival rocket launches, and Musk shared a meme referring to the two centibillionaires becoming “best friends.”
Musk is by far the wealthiest person on the planet thanks to his $433 billion net worth at Tuesday’s market close, according to our latest estimates, with a majority of his richest coming from his stakes in SpaceX and Tesla. Dimon is the 1,237th-wealthiest person in the world, worth $2.7 billion, mostly from his $2 billion stake in JPMorgan.