When a young Jamie Dimon started his banking career in the early 1980s — after Sandy Weill wooed him to join American Express to have “more fun”— he was fond of bumming cigarettes from his colleagues.
Now 58, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase is facing an unspecified but “curable” kind of throat cancer, and eight weeks of radiation treatment and chemotherapy.
Mary Erdoes, the CEO of the bank’s asset management group; Matt Zames, the bank’s chief operating officer; Gordon Smith, head of consumer banking; and Daniel Pinto, who runs the investment bank, are seen as the most likely successors, insiders told The Post.
Dimon never bought a pack of smokes in his life, according to a person directly familiar with his thinking.
And since the early ’80s, Dimon has traded his cigs and nicotine for aerobics, regular jogs and 5:30 a.m. visits to the gym.
Dimon, in a letter to investors and shareholders on Tuesday evening, revealed he’s been diagnosed with a curable throat cancer that hasn’t spread past a nearby lymph node.
The bank boss said he doesn’t expect to skip work while getting treatment through the rest of the summer.
Smoking, drinking hard alcohol and human papillomavirus are the main causes of most types of throat cancer, said Dr. Ping Gu, an oncologist at NYU Langone Medical Center.
Though if someone hasn’t smoked in nearly 30 years, that’s probably not what’s caused it, he added.
The doctor treating Dimon wasn’t able to determine what could have caused the growth in his throat, the source said.
Dimon’s health has caused speculation about who could step up to help run the largest US bank, especially as some of Dimon’s most prominent consiglieri have stepped aside in the last year.
He first noticed that “something might be wrong” about two weeks ago, one source said, sparking a battery of tests. Those tests included CAT scans and a biopsy, Dimon said in his letter.
He first got the cancer diagnosis on Monday, the source said.
While there were scant details about Dimon’s cancer, he wrote in his letter that it was found “quickly.”
“For the stage one and stage two [cancer], the survival rate is 60 to 90 percent,” Gu said. That’s “pretty high.”
There’s a 20 to 30 percent chance that the cancer could come back even after successful treatment, he added.
Dimon intends to go through radiation and chemo treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital, he said in his letter.
More invasive options, like surgery, aren’t currently planned, bank spokesman Joe Evangelisti said.