- JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he and Elon Musk “hugged it out” and put aside nearly a decade of tense interactions thanks to a conversation the pair had at a conference last year.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Tesla CEO Elon Musk apparently hugged out their previous disagreements, and now the longtime banking executive wants to help out the world’s richest man's companies.
Dimon and Musk buried the hatchet at a JPMorgan conference, Dimon said in an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday.
“Elon and I hugged it out,” he said. “He came to one of our conferences, [and] he and I had a nice, long chat. We settled some of our differences.”
Dimon was likely referring to a JPMorgan technology conference in March 2024, which featured them sharing the stage and fielding questions about Israel, AI, and politics, the Wall Street Journal reported. At the time, the pair appeared to get along, and they had a private conversation that reportedly lasted more than an hour.
Far from their history of tense exchanges, Dimon instead praised Musk and said he wanted to help him.
“The guy is our Einstein,” the JPMorgan CEO told CNBC. “I’d like to be helpful to him and his companies as much as we can.”
JPMorgan and Tesla did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The tense history between Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk
The pair’s icy relations started about a decade ago when JPMorgan denied Musk’s request to have the bank underwrite leases for his Tesla EVs. At the time, Musk called up the head of consumer banking at JPMorgan and reportedly shouted expletives and threatened to pull Tesla’s commercial banking business, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the relationship between Dimon and Musk.
The incident reportedly angered Dimon, who called Musk to say the bank would not be bullied, the Journal reported.
Musk reportedly made good on his promise to pull Tesla’s commercial banking business from JPMorgan, which he said also drew the ire of its CEO.
“But when I asked Jamie Dimon at one point for support with a Tesla automotive leasing line, he declined to support Tesla,” Musk testified in an unrelated lawsuit in 2023, the Journal reported.
“So I withdrew all commercial banking business from JPMorgan, which, to say the least, made JPMorgan hate Tesla and me very much.”
In 2021, their relationship also took a hit when JPMorgan filed a $162 million lawsuit arguing Tesla owed the bank for a trade it helped arrange in 2014, according to the Journal. Tesla countersued and the matter escalated.
Yet JPMorgan agreed to drop the lawsuit in December 2024, and Tesla also said it would drop its countersuit. Terms of the deal were not made public, Reuters reported.
"JPMorgan and Tesla have decided to enter into a new commercial relationship and settle the outstanding disputes between the companies,” a JPMorgan spokesperson told Reuters in December last year.
As Musk prepares to take a more active role in President Donald Trump’s administration as the head of the advisory Department of Government Efficiency, Dimon wished him luck.
“Government needs to be more accountable, it needs to be more efficient. It should be outcomes-based,” Dimon said Wednesday. “I mean, I’d say department by department. So I wish them the best.”
