JPMorgan’s $3B Temple of Work & The Louvre Looted in Broad Daylight

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0:40Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, is it better to have louped and lost than never to have louped at all? Then J.P. Morgan wanted workers back in the office, so it spent$3 billion building a new one. It's Monday, October 20th. Let's ride.

1:01Happy Monday. The internet's broken. Well, a big chunk of it. An Amazon Web Services outage overnight took down dozens of major websites, including Amazon, Lyft, Reddit, the McDonald's app, Robinhood, Snapchat, Venmo, Delta, and games like Roblox and Fortnite. Shortly after 5 a.m. Eastern Time, AWS said it was seeing, quote, significant signs of recovery. But just a heads up that if a particular app isn't working for you this morning, it's probably not you. Toby, sorry, I can't complete your Venmo request. I don't know what to say. Maybe we'll just call it even. It's brutal, Neil. I woke up today from my morning session of Pokemon Go while listening to Amazon Music and browsing Delta Airlines.

1:41Couldn't do it, so they were all down. I tried to play Class Royale on my Peloton while texting on Signal. No luck there either. But seriously, this does affect people's real lives. One Verge author noted that when a smart assistant like Alexa is down, routines like preset alarms don't function either. So if you're late for work, you have a built-in excuse. It kind of makes me feel like Neil in the Matrix right now, though, because somehow every service we need to bring you Morning Brew Daily is still up and working. So fingers crossed. Hopefully this internet shutdown doesn't affect you all too much either.

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2:49Transform ad buys into brand-defining moments where culture happens and fandoms thrive. Learn more at DisneyCampaignManager.com. That's DisneyCampaignManager.com. Jamie Dimon wants his workers back in the office so badly, he built them the nicest one in the world. Six years and$3 billion later, J.P. Morgan's towering new headquarters in midtown Manhattan is finally open to workers. 10 ,000 finance professionals will call 270 Park Ave Home, which the Wall Street Journal described as a temple to the workplace and a love letter to Wall Street culture. What does$3 billion buy you these days? For one, you won't have to door dash any meals because there are 19 restaurants inside.

3:32That's to go along with the coffee shops, company store, and gym. There's even a full-on English pub called Morgan's. The architect behind the project, Norman Foster, called it one of the crown jewels of his portfolio, which also includes Hearst Tower and Apple Park. In terms of leisure, entertainment, lifestyle, he told the journal, I would say that every level of this tower pushes those boundaries further than anything we've done before. But make no mistake, this was Jamie Dimon's brainchild through and through, who's been searching for a new HQ almost as long as he's been CEO of the bank. Dimon is perhaps the most outspoken advocate of in-person work in the business world, having been caught in the past making multiple expletive-filled rants against remote work culture.

4:12So he turned to Field of Dreams to make his outlook on work a reality. If you build it, you can force them to come. Neil, it feels like this is Jamie Dimon searching for legacy. It wasn't enough to build J.P. Morgan into the biggest bank in the world. He also wanted a 60-story tower that embodies his worldview on work leadership and permanence. This is like an alpha male marking its territory in the animal world because J.P. Morgan just hasn't built this new headquarters, but they've been buying up a bunch of office buildings or leasing it all around this particular neighborhood. And now a 6 million square feet of office space in just the span of a few blocks.

4:50That's almost as much as Goldman Sachs has in all of North and South America. And it's really a sign of how J.P. Morgan has leapfrogged its rivals to become the biggest bank in the United States by far. Go back 10 years. It was basically the same size as rivals Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Now it is worth more than all of those three banks combined. Last year had more profit than any bank in the history of the United States. And since Jamie Dimon became CEO at the start of 2006, he has nearly quadrupled JP Morgan's balance sheet to around$4.6 trillion. So this is him marking his legacy and saying, yeah, I came in like the rest of you folks, and I absolutely just demolished all the rest of you.

5:32Speaking of demolished, that's a great segue. It was a wild concept to tear down the original building in the first place. They had a 52-story HQ in the same spot. That was fine. There wasn't anything wrong with the building, but Jamie Dimon wanting something bigger. So they literally started going floor by floor. That's the way you tear down a big building surrounded by other big buildings. You have to take it apart piece by piece. That started in 2019. What came next was the pandemic. You're building this massive office space. You just had all your work shut down. What do you do? Do you keep going?

6:02They kind of ran a cost-benefit analysis and said, yes, it does make sense to keep going. It is just crazy how much of a fortress this place actually is. They had to do it's 400 million pounds of steel. I can't even wrap my head around that. So they had to drill 100 feet into the bedrock of Manhattan. There are subway lines and rail stations down there. They had to demolish a rail station and promise to rebuild it in order to make way for the foundation. So just as a piece of architecture, this thing is a behemoth. It is staggering in size and scale. It is a physical behemoth, but it's also symbolic in many ways of J.P.

6:38Morgan's obsession or Jamie Dimon's, you know, obsession with finance and wanting to put his mark on New York City. Because we're at a time where maybe the new mayor elections or Mamdani, who is the front runner, has decried billionaires. And maybe this is Jamie Dimon's way of saying, yeah, look, finance still runs this town. In actuality, J.P. Morgan has more employees in Texas than it does in New York City, but it doesn't have this massive skyscraper. And that's what Jamie Dimon wants to leave as his legacy. He kind of did hint at this. He says, what we do is we move paper around, Dimon said.

7:13This is a permanent thing. So you can see why he wants to pursue this line of building, like, you know, the biggest office space in the finance world. because it's just all fairy dust. You know, I think back to the Wolf of Wall Street scene where he's saying it's all numbers. None of it is real. A building is real. So that's why maybe he put$3 billion into it. Yeah, so next time you visit New York or Manhattan, you see a massive new building. You can't miss it. It's kind of scary looking too. It's a little scary. It's on these fans. It doesn't look like it should be able to be propped up by those flimsy little supports, but apparently they've done the math and hopefully it's all good.

7:44All right, so if you're a J.P. Morgan employee in New York City, let us know how the new office is because you're definitely going in. In a heist as daring as Nicolas Cage stealing the Declaration of Independence, mass thieves broke into the Louvre in Paris on Sunday morning, stealing jewels of, quote, inestimable value from the world's most popular museum in broad daylight while people were in the museum. The Louvre closed down yesterday as investigators took inventory of the objects that were stolen and checked in with the Mona Lisa to make sure she was holding up OK. It's still shut down as of this morning.

8:16One of the most high-profile museum thefts in recent memory took all of seven minutes. Officials said that intruders used a truck-mounted furniture elevator on the Seine side of the museum, where construction is underway, to access a gallery that held the French crown jewels and other treasures. They forced open a window using an angle grinder and smashed open two display cases. Then four individuals jetted off into the Paris morning with their loot on motorbikes. Interior Minister Lorraine Nunez called it a major robbery conducted by a very experienced team that clearly knew the site well. It may be impossible to put a price tag on what they grabbed.

8:50According to officials, the thieves nabbed priceless items from the Napoleonic jewelry collection, but at least one stolen jewel, Empress Eugenie's crown, was found broken outside the museum, which is not ideal considering it's covered in nearly 1 ,400 diamonds and 56 emeralds. Beyond their market value, the items have innestable heritage and historical value, Nunez said. Now a massive manhunt is on to find the perpetrators and recover these jewels, while officials try to figure out how one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the French capital was breached so easily. For the French, this is a national embarrassment.

9:23Yeah, the police were piecing together how it was done. In addition to those angle grinders, they found a blowtorch, gasoline gloves, walkie-talkies, and a blanket. So it was this very professional-grade operation. It wasn't just someone who walked by one day and said, I'm going to rob the Louvre. They also found a yellow vest to disguise themselves as workmen a bit further away. And that is, I don't know if you've heard about the yellow vest theory, but basically if you are wearing a workman's vest, you get access to places that you never should get access to. You can walk right into the movies.

9:53You can walk right into amusement parks if you are wearing this. So I would like to say that if I saw some people, you know, banging on the window of a Louvre in broad daylight, I would say, hey, something's amiss here. But if they're wearing workman's vest, then it does go a long way to disguising their actual intentions. Now, what do you do with these jewels if you are the thieves? You have these priceless jewels, but obviously you want a price from them. That's the whole that's the entire point of stealing them. Well, are we going to see them again? Are you going to see them pop up on eBay or the Internet?

10:20Well, a bunch of art experts say we're never going to see these jewels again. What they're going to do typically is they take them apart, essentially, from the crown. They're going to take all these diamonds and all these emeralds from everything that they took and then reconstitute them somehow and then try to sell them in different ways. But art experts say it's really not that difficult to do this. So you will see the thieves try to sell them unless the French authorities get them before this happens. But it's looking a little unlikely. We were talking before the show. It seems like much smarter to steal diamonds than to steal a painting because you can't recut a Picasso, for instance.

10:54It always is going to be a Picasso. Its value is tied into exactly how it looks. With this, though, you can go and recut them and sell them on the black market. I also can't help but think back when I hear this story to January, which is when Macron kind of stood by the Mona Lisa and said, we're going to do this big Louvre renovation right now. There's too many visitors. We're going to have a new entrance. Some of the, you know, basic things like air conditioning is something that has been falling to the wayside. So we're going to plow all this money into redoing the Louvre basically. And then nine months later, it has been broken into in very embarrassing fashion.

11:27So it does feel like this is striking at the heart of, you know, Parisian culture in a way when you have just such abrasion robbery happen in broad daylight after you announce this big, you know, makeover of the museum. It's not the first robbery that happened at the Louvre. Maybe it won't be the last after this particular renovation. But go back to 1911. This was probably the most famous robbery in art history. Someone who was working within the Louvre stole the Mona Lisa in 1911. And back then, which is very interesting, the Mona Lisa wasn't that famous of a painting. And it was this particular robbery that led to Mona Lisa becoming the most famous artwork in the entire world.

12:06It was recovered two years later in Florence when the guy tried to sell it. So there you go. But it does tie it into this broader concern that French authorities have about their museums. In fact, it goes across Europe of museums not being particularly well protected. Just in September,$700 ,000 worth of gold was stolen from the Natural History Museum. There was another robbery also that month in another museum. 2019, there was a massive robbery back in Dresden, Germany, where people stole over$120 million worth of goods. So this is kind of an epidemic that is going around, especially as precious metals prices rise.

12:45There's going to be a lot more demand for these kind of things. Moving on, welcome to Winners of the Weekend, the segment where Toby and I picked two things that went Apple picking and were secure enough not to post about it. I won the pre-show pumpkin carving competition, so I get to go first. And my winner is Walmart because it's about to receive one of the most prized accolades in all of corporate America, a Harvard Business School case study. This fall, Walmart's story will be taught to our future bosses with a specific focus on one decision that changed the company's trajectory forever, investing in its employees.

13:18According to the Wall Street Journal, the case study will dissect a momentous change Walmart made 10 years ago. It raised its starting wage to$9 an hour. As the largest private employer in the country, Walmart's move amounted to the biggest pay raise in U.S. history, but also cost it dearly. Shares plunged 10 % on the announcement, causing more than$21 billion in market value to vanish in a matter of hours. But those investors turned out to be very wrong in the long run, as the case study will explain. The pay bump and subsequent actions to invest in frontline employees prove fundamental to Walmart's return to growth after years of stagnation.

13:53Since the pay decision in 2015, U.S. sales have grown each consecutive year, while shares have more than doubled in the past five. With revenue of$681 billion last year, Walmart has held on to its spot as the U.S.'s largest retailer by sales. Other executives are taking notes. Earlier this month, hundreds of leaders from firms like Blackstone and Bank of America traveled to Walmart HQ in Arkansas to learn how Walmart approaches worker management in the hopes of replicating its success. Herbert Jolly, a senior lecturer at HBS and co-author of the case study, told the journal his goal is to inspire more business leaders to have the courage and also the tools to be able to make the decision at Walmart did.

14:31Yeah, this wasn't benevolence, though. It wasn't necessarily just courage. It was they looked at what was happening in their business. They saw a ton of turnover. They saw that customer service was deteriorating. Labor activists were also circling as well. And Amazon was, you know, breathing down its neck, both culturally and operationally. operationally. So it said, we need to do something here. And that something was raising, you know, the starting wage of Walmart employees. It also was at a point where they didn't even know if they could grow anymore. Walmart got to such a size, even back in 2015, that they're like, how many more Walmarts can we even build?

15:05So they kind of had this culture of emphasizing profitability over growth. And so they were trying to always eke out more from less, but then they said, we can still grow. This is our way to growth. It's by investing in people. So a fascinating, you know, turning point where it could have gone either direction. They said that people is the most important thing here. And it clearly worked in the long run. And if you go back to this announcement, it was a massive deal. This is like the Michael Scott shareholders meeting where they announced it in front of all of their investors. And everyone started asking questions because this is going to cost them, you know, over$3 billion over the course of multiple years.

15:39It It was going to hurt their margins by a lot to pay over their one million employees more money. So they actually had to, like, as executives announced this, they received so many questions. They actually had to leave the stage. And then as they were heading back to the airport, Jim Cramer from CNBC called and said, guys, we did an interview earlier in the day. You did not mention this. You have to come back to the studio and talk about this because shareholders right now are in revolt. So this was a major drama. And they really did have to stick their guns. And it seemed like it absolutely paid off in the long run.

16:10as students at HBS will learn. Fascinating to see how they're going to navigate this next decade, though, where, you know, automation starts coming into play, where AI starts coming into play. Do you still double down on human workers even more? Who knows? Maybe there's going to be another tenant year, a decade later case study about what Walmart did at this moment in time that sets them up for the future. And it really sets the tone because they are the largest employer in the United States. So when they raised their minimum wage to nine dollars an hour, pretty much every other retailer had to follow in order to retain and acquire workers.

16:41So Target, TJX, the owner of TJ Maxx, also responded pretty much right after Walmart made the decision. So what Walmart does in this next 10 years when it comes to automation, robotics in their warehouses, will set the industry standard. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with my winner of the weekend. You know that saying, more money, more problems, Toby? Of course. Why do you think my life is so chaotic. Sure. Well, with startups, it's more like more money, more security. Big enterprise deals usually come with even bigger security and compliance requirements. Yeah, the right kind of security posture doesn't just protect you.

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17:59Through this special referral offer, when you get a new Apple Card, you can earn bonus daily cash. To qualify, you must apply at apple.co slash getdailycash. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.99 % to 28.24 % based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1st, 2025. Offer may not be available elsewhere. Terms and limitations apply. My winner of the weekend is first impressions because they matter so much. People are increasingly turning to AI headshots to give them a leg up when applying for jobs. 88 % of job seekers say that a polished digital presence influences hiring decisions.

18:41A 45 % jump year over year, according to Canva. But for a long time, professional photos have been something financially out of reach for a lot of people. Enter an explosion of AI headshot tools. Insta Headshots, PhotoPacks, AI, Headshots Pro, they are all options that promise professional quality images in minutes with no studio or photographer required, all for under$50. On the flip side, as AI-generated portraits become nigh indistinguishable to the average viewer, that can hurt the business of photographers who have long relied on corporate sessions as a steady business model. Still, recruiters caution not to get too carried away.

19:16Sometimes using an AI headshot tool leads to an overly smooth feel, inconsistent details and lighting mismatches which can feel inauthentic a bad ai headshot is worse than a no headshot said a career expert from zip recruiter neil this is another example of ai inserting itself into the hiring process one that is affecting all sides of the equation from applicants to recruiters to the photographers themselves yeah i guess the one benefit or one advantage that you could say i could you know i could use an ai headshot no one will notice is these people have never seen you before, the applicants. So they're just doing a quick cursory glance on LinkedIn.

19:52And that first impression is so important. And with the rise of AI headshots, I mean, it's understandable because headshots are very expensive. We were getting headshots. They're hundreds of dollars. And you can only have one particular background or the customization is somewhat limited with AI headshots. Think about it. You upload a selfie. You say, I want this particular background. You answer a few questions that they have. And then the customization is absolutely infinite. Put me in this background. Make me give it a glamour shot. Make it look more professional. Put me in a suit. Put me in a T-shirt.

20:24And that's what these AI headshot companies promise for a fraction of the price. I mean, some of the articles that we read, these people were doing AI headshots for$25. And you get hundreds and hundreds of photos that you can use for this very critical part of the hiring process. But it does seem like a lot of career experts say, consider which industry you're applying in. For instance, actors or actresses, very important to have a real headshot. You don't want to use AI there because your face is your moneymaker in that regard. But if you work for something like a call center where it doesn't necessarily matter what you look like, then maybe AI headshots can help you.

21:01Some people reported having great success when they updated their LinkedIn profile using a more professional-looking headshot, which, honestly, just take AI out of the equation. That's just a smart thing to do. They saw three to four times more inbound requests from recruiters. So it is smart to have a polished digital presence. Going about it using AI, that is kind of up to you. It's almost a risk because if it comes off as inauthentic, then you're probably going to get skipped over more than if you just had a worse headshot. Now, what's interesting is what are LinkedIn rules around this? Does it allow an AI headshot for you to use?

21:35And yes, it does. The photo, the LinkedIn says it's OK, but the photo must reflect your likeness. Photos that don't comply with our user agreement may be removed. So LinkedIn says, yeah, if it looks like you, then that's OK. And I assume you would want to use one that looks like you. But overall, zooming out, this is another threat to the photography business. You know, the headshots is a big part of their business. I wonder what's coming next. Like, are we going to get AI wedding photography? Like, have me doing this cool dance move that I didn't do or have me doing the limbo from, like, two feet below?

22:09I mean, just get a little flexible. You know, you can do things yourself, Neil. Well, listen, I think you can break it down in the dance floor with the best of them. But I feel for the photography industry because name an industry that's been more in flux by, you know, different inventions. They went from film to digital. Then Photoshop got introduced. And then smartphones got introduced where everyone was a photographer. Now you throw AI into the mix. So it is one of those things where is it going to be a replacement or is it just going to become another tool in the toolkit? Some of the best photographers say it's just a tool.

22:39You know, we've been under assault for decades in this industry. It's just going to you still need the artistry. You still need the ability to capture someone's soul and essence rather than just outsourcing it to AI completely. So fascinating to once again be in the shoes of saying, how is this going to disrupt our daily workflows again? All right, moving on. It is Monday. So here's what you need to know to stay ahead in the week ahead. On Wall Street, corporate earnings and an inflation report will test a market that's gotten a little more wobbly lately. Netflix and Tesla are the earnings headliners, joined by Procter & Gamble, GM, Coca-Cola, IBM, and Intel.