James Robinson III, American Express executive, 1935-2024

In the summer of 1991, as he tells it, Warren Buffett was in trouble. The Berkshire Hathaway chair had risked his reputation trying to save Salomon Brothers, a scandal-plagued investment bank few wanted to do business with.

That’s when he got a call from James Robinson III, who was then the chief executive of American Express and the biggest power broker on Wall Street. The two didn’t know each other well, despite serving together on the board of Coca-Cola.

Robinson, who has died aged 88, told him AmEx was hiring Salomon to help advise it on one of the biggest deals of the year. “It was probably a disadvantage to add us, but he knew I was in trouble,” Buffett told the Financial Times this week. “He never brought it up again, and the world moved on, but I never forgot. Jimmy was a very decent guy.”

Robinson, who was widely known as “Jimmy three sticks” for the numerals after his name but preferred Jim, joined the world of finance when banks made loans, brokers sold stocks and the term cross-selling had yet to be invented. He rose quickly, becoming the chief executive and chair of AmEx in 1977 when he was just 41.

Over the next 16 years, he spearheaded a string of deals, buying brokerage EF Hutton, investment bank Lehman Brothers, insurance firm Fireman’s Fund and other businesses that turned the charge-card company into the world’s first global “financial supermarket”.

Under Robinson, AmEx capitalised on one of America’s most memorable corporate tag lines — “Don’t leave home without it” — and created the platinum card. Robinson played statesman, advising Ronald Reagan on trade policy, but also brawled in some of the hardest-fought Wall Street battles of the day. Most prominently, these included a losing role in the fight for control of RJR Nabisco, which became the backdrop for the popular book Barbarians at the Gate. Actor Fred Thompson, who later became a US senator, portrayed Robinson in the movie version of the book.

By 1989, AmEx had issued tens of millions of cards and was the US’s largest asset manager as well as its most valuable financial firm, with a market value approaching $10bn.

Robinson was pushed out in 1993 after heavy losses related to his acquisitions and his empire was quickly dismantled by successors. But what should have been a cautionary tale became the blueprint for modern finance.

“In one of the obits I read this week, I saw that Robinson thought it was unfair that I got the reputation as the risk taker and not him, and he was absolutely right,” Sandy Weill, who was once one of Robinson’s top executives before leaving to do his own string of deals to build Citigroup, told the FT this week.

Despite Weill’s acrimonious exit from AmEx in the mid-80s, Weill said he and Robinson remained life-long friends. “He absolutely changed the course of the industry.”

Robinson was born in Atlanta in 1935, a scion of a prominent southern banking family. He got a degree in industrial management at Georgia Institute of Technology and joined the Navy, serving two years in Pearl Harbor, before getting a Harvard MBA. He was married twice, first to Betty Bradley, with whom he had two of his four children, and then in 1984 to Linda Robinson, a prominent public relations executive.

Ken Chenault, who headed AmEx from 2001 to 2018, says he was still in his 30s when James Robinson called him to say he saw potential in the young employee. “No one would expect a CEO to take notice of a junior executive at the time,” he said, “but that was Jim. He would go the extra mile to connect with people.” On trips to call centres, Chenault recalled, Robinson would regularly jump in and take customer calls.

Robinson’s exercise routines, which included starting the day with 100 sit-ups, were legendary at AmEx. He was a gym regular well into his 70s, and at 76 bragged about leg-pressing 900 pounds. “I wanted to do 1,000, but they wouldn’t let me,” he told the New York Times in 2012.

After leaving AmEx, Robinson and his son, James Robinson IV, launched the venture capital firm RRE Ventures, which manages $2.5bn today. He was active for years in the World Travel & Tourism Council, an industry group he helped form, and served as an honorary chair of a New York cancer hospital, Memorial Sloan Kettering. He also organised fundraising campaigns and championed Spelman College, a historically black college in Atlanta. In 1982, Spelman gave him an honorary degree alongside Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be elected to Congress.

Robinson, a life-long golfer, joined Chenault and some others for two back-to-back rounds at the Augusta National course two years ago. He seemed to be in some pain, Chenault recalled, but still shot his age on the first 18. For the second round, he rode along in a cart, chatting up some of the young tech chief executives who were part of the golf outing.

“The tech executives marvelled at how up to date Robinson was on their companies and tech landscape,” said Chenault. “He was courtly but also didn’t stand on ceremony, and could connect with anyone.”