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conditions and guarantees. Weill had hired Morgan Stanley to represent him in the deal.
    For reasons of its own—including a desire not to be embarrassed if Sandy Weill managed to take profit that could be theirs alone—the board rejected the idea. “It was a weird situation,” Dimon recalls.“Someone said at the time that American Express couldn’t do a deal if Sandy, Morgan Stanley, and Warren Buffett were on the other side. That’s part of the reason Sandy had offered to let them keep 40 percent, so if they thought it was a little cheap, they’d make it back on the back end. But I really hope that wasn’t the reason they didn’t do it, because that would be pretty stupid.”
    The prospect of partnering with Warren Buffett was dead. Weill sensed that Robinson had outmaneuvered him. He’d given up his operational responsibilities, and was now being treated as an adversary by the board of the very company he worked for. He decided he had to resign, and he did on Monday, June 25, 1985. “Sandy never fit in there anyway,” recalls Alison Falls McElvery, one of his assistants at the time. “On the one hand, you had all these upstanding, pressed, and beautiful people like Jim Robinson who just reeked of money. And then you had Sandy who would yell down the hallway to ask someone how their weekend had been.” (This despite the fact that Weill had a greater net worth than Robinson.)
    The question for the 29-year-old Dimon: should he go with Weill? Jim Robinson offered to keep Dimon on as a vice president in another role, and by that point he could have worked anywhere else he wanted, maybe even at Goldman. “It was a complex decision,” Dimon recalls. Many friends, including Stephen Burke and Andrall Pearson, president and chief operating officer of Pepsi, told Dimon this was
his
chance to cut bait, to admit that his gamble on Weill had not panned out. After all, he now had a wife, and a child just a few weeks old, to care for, and Weill wasn’t getting any younger. Dimon discussed the future with his Harvard buddy Peter Maglathlin that summer on vacation at the Kents’ summer house in Delaware’s Bethany Beach. “Is this guy washed up?” Maglathlin asked. “Does he even have another act?” “I have faith in Sandy,” Dimon replied. “Something’s going to happen.”
    It was surely a mix of factors—loyalty, an appetite for adventure, a conviction that Sandy Weill had another run left in him—that led Dimon to ignore his friends’ advice and resign from American Express along with his boss. Weill offered to pay Dimon $100,000 a year to stay on as his assistant, although American Express covered the cost temporarily.McElvery decided to join Weill as well. Dimon remembers being reluctant to take money from Weill, despite the fact that Weill was by that point a very rich man. “I didn’t like it,” Dimon recalls. “We weren’t earning anything. I figured I could take money on the come for a while, and if we figured anything out, I could get paid then. I wasn’t particularly fond of the idea.”
    • • •
    New York City is chock-full of former Wall Street highfliers who have offices paid for by the companies they used to run but no actual job to speak of. They’re called elephants’ graveyards. At the time, American Express was large enough to have graveyards in several locations including offices in the Seagram Building at 52nd and Park. Weill chose that location, in no small part because The Four Seasons restaurant—home of the original “power lunch”—was on the building’s ground floor.
    In his earlier heyday, Weill had promised John Loeb Sr. of Loeb Rhoades an office for life when Shearson bought Loeb Rhoades, an obligation American Express had taken on when it had subsequently purchased Shearson. It was Weill’s turn to go to the graveyard now, though, and in an ironic twist he found that American Express had put him in a suite with Loeb.
    After settling into their offices in July