CEO of Major Bank Receives $3 Million Salary Bump

It's not a radical concept for CEOs to have exorbitant salaries.

In the wake of the pandemic and job losses, many CEOs and founders took pay cuts to compensate employees and set an example, with some (like Elon Musk) even publicly announcing they are not salaried at all.

But a new brow-raising report from JPMorgan Chase shows that the company went swiftly in the opposite direction with CEO Jamie Dimon.

According to filings on Thursday, Dimon received a solid $3 million pay bump in the year 2021, a 9.5% salary increase that brought his annual earnings to $34.5 million.

$28 million of Dimon's total earnings came from stock holdings while another $5 million came in the form of a bonus on top of his $1.5 million base salary.

In 2020, Dimon's salary at the time was around 400 times more than the average JPMorgan Chase employee's salary, something he was questioned about in an interview with Jim VandeHei on Axios on HBO in October 2021.

"We have a lot of high-paid people. We pay people to do a great job," Dimon said at the time. "They could all sell their services elsewhere. I need to maintain the best team on the playing field, and I need to pay them fairly to do that. You may or may not like that, but that's what it is."

JPMorgan has not yet disclosed its average employee salary for 2021.

This past June, it was reported that first-year analysts at the company would be given a starting salary of $100,000 (up from $85,000) and that salary bumps were made effective in July.

JPMorgan Chase was up around 7% year over year as of Friday afternoon.