Jamie Dimon was fired from Citigroup at 42. He says his youngest daughter asked if their family would have to sleep on the street

While the exact reasoning for his firing has been debated over time, in an episode of the podcast Acquired, Dimon said that “they said they wanted to make a few changes [and] had three of them: ‘One, we want to make this person in charge of that.’ I said OK, well that didn’t make sense to me. The second one, they wanted to put someone in charge of the global investment bank which I was running, I thought it was another stupid decision. And the third they said ‘And we want you to resign.’”

The news of Dimon’s departure was met with shock on Wall Street — and in Dimon’s own home, it was met with fear.

When he returned home to share the news, one of his daughters asked, “Daddy, do we have to sleep on the streets?” and another asked, “Can I still go to college?”

Even at that moment, Dimon wasn’t worried that his family would go homeless or that his children would not be able to afford college. But how did he recover after this devastating blow?

Carving a new path

In the time after his firing from Citigroup, Dimon dabbled with different ideas of what his future career might be. He told Acquired he considered teaching, starting his own merchant bank and even retirement.

At one point, he even spoke to Jeff Bezos about running Amazon, but he wasn’t committed to joining the tech world. He also had other offers to run global investment banks, which he did not name.

The offer that ended up striking a chord with Dimon was joining Bank One, which had just undergone a merger. At the time, it was valued at around $20 billion, while Citigroup was at $200 billion, Fortune reported.

Dimon ended up taking on the role of CEO of Bank One in 2000, and invested $60 million directly into Bank One’s stock when he took the job.