JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon has enlisted tech billionaires, former top generals, and cabinet officials – including Jeff Bezos and Condoleezza Rice – to advise a sweeping national security spending push.
The group will help the bank decide where to put $1.5 trillion in investment over the next decade, announced in October and designed to reduce America’s reliance on foreign countries over the next decade.
Chaired by Dimon, the panel will also include Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies, Robert Gates, former U.S. Defense Secretary in the Bush and Obama administrations, and Jim Farley, CEO of Ford.
Dimon told Fox News: “National security is critical, not just for us, but for a lot of countries… If you had any illusion the world would be peaceful in our lives…it was shattered.”
JPMorgan also said Todd Combs, a longtime portfolio manager at Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, will join to run a new $10 billion investment fund backing companies working on sensitive technologies, from advanced chips and AI to critical minerals.
Dimon has been sounding the alarm for months about American reliance on foreign suppliers, pointing to China’s dominance in minerals, batteries, and pharmaceuticals. He has said the country could be caught short in a crisis, and that business leaders need to think less about quarterly results and more about national resilience.
His security drive already has one deal on the books. In October, JPMorgan bought a small stake in Perpetua Resources, a mining firm developing a site in Idaho that could eventually produce antimony, a metal used in ammunition. Most of the world’s supply currently comes from China and Russia.
The $1.5 trillion will include loans, underwriting and investments the bank expects to make over the next 10 years, the bank said in October.
It is not the first time Dimon has set grand targets. A $2.5 trillion climate-finance pledge launched four years ago has gone quiet, while a healthcare joint venture with Bezos and Buffett was quietly wound down in 2021.
The new advisory group has no formal authority but is expected to meet periodically and offer views on where the bank should spend its money. It also provides access to some of the best connected names in business and government.
The panel includes Bezos, Rice, Dell, Gates, Farley, and Combs, along with retired generals Chris Cavoli and Ann Dunwoody, former Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, former NSA director Paul Nakasone, former House speaker Paul Ryan, and General Dynamics CEO Phebe Novakovic.