(Reuters) -Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman said Jamie Dimon should run for president in the next U.S. elections after the JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO expressed his interest in pursuing a public office.
“I love my country, and maybe one day I’ll serve my country in one capacity or another,” Dimon said in an interview with Bloomberg TV earlier on Wednesday, when asked if he would ever consider public office.
Ackman called Dimon an “exemplary leader” and lauded him for having “superbly managed” JPMorgan through every crisis.
“Our country is at risk with $32T (trillion) of debt with no end to massive deficits in sight, heading into a recession at a time of great political uncertainty,” Ackman said in a tweet on Wednesday.
“… Clearly he is thinking about running. I can’t imagine a better time for him to do so,” Ackman said.
There have been speculations about Dimon’s potential presidential run in the future. At a conference in 2018, he reportedly quipped about hypothetically campaigning against then-president Donald Trump.
“I think I could beat Trump … because I’m as tough as he is, I’m smarter than he is,” he said, according to a report.
Dimon later walked back on those comments, saying that the remark proved he would not make a good politician.
“If he decides to get out of banking, I think he would be really good in politics,” former President Bill Clinton once said of Dimon.
A spokesperson for JPMorgan declined to comment.
Dimon is currently on his first visit to China since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ackman, who runs Pershing Square Capital Management and has a bulging Rolodex filled with Wall Street bankers, corporate executives and politicians, has been using Twitter more extensively ever since he announced last year that he was retiring from “vocal” activist investing life.
He has most recently weighed in on the banking crisis and urged the United States to raise FDIC insurance to shore up confidence.
In the 2016 presidential election, Ackman had urged former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg to run for president.
(Reporting by Niket Nishant in Bengaluru and Svea Herbst-Bayliss in New York; additional reporting by Jaiveer Shekhawat in Bengaluru Editing by Anil D’Silva)
