JPMorgan humiliates itself in front of all of Twitter

An invitation to ask the vice chairman questions elicits quite a lot of excellent ones -- here are the best

Published November 14, 2013 8:46PM (EST)

  (Reuters/Yuri Gripas)
(Reuters/Yuri Gripas)

God, the folks who run JPMorgan Chase are so smart. So smart! Heroes, too -- never forget how they were nice enough to take over Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, when the mean old government asked them to. That was so polite. And smart.

What is the key to their vast moneymaking apparatus? They're so polite -- again, with the politeness -- that they offered to tell the whole world whatever they wanted to know yesterday, on Twitter.

 

The bank, see, just helped underwrite Twitter's IPO, a project spearheaded by this V.C., Mr. Lee. Having raked in an insane amount in fees, Lee must've decided he'd give this Twitter thing a little spin himself, to see what joy he just brought to the public. And you just won't believe what the mean old Internet did to JPMorgan next: It used this open forum to heckle JPMorgan. Or, more precisely: It used this opportunity to ask a JPMorgan exec questions to ask JPMorgan exec questions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Oh, there are some thousands more, with new ones popping up every few seconds. A great participation rate. The JPMorgan P.R. team should be proud? What? Really? Why do you have to do that?


The questions that #AskJPM solicited, as the New York Times puts it in its New York Times voice, were "a stream of ribald questions and hostile jokes." Many weren't even fit for print in a family newspaper like the Times (which nevertheless finds ample space to publish vulgarities like this). And sure, many of the "questions" were "HEY JPM, I WILL SIT ON YOUR FACE" type missives. But there were some real questions, too, and sharp ones. Mostly from smart people like David Dayen and Alexis Goldstein (all hail!).

Anyway, affixing a "kick me" sign to your back quite like this is only something a poorly run company would do and Jamie Dimon should be fired for this, too. Not really. But yes.


By Jim Newell

Jim Newell covers politics and media for Salon.

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