Behind the bounty
Jinbe is the only Straw Hat who had a career before coming aboard. He was already a wanted man while Luffy was learning to walk: a soldier in King Neptune's army, then captain of the Sun Pirates after Fisher Tiger's death, then holder of a Warlord's seat, then a man Emperors negotiated with. At Wano, he took the helmsman's post.
The post is not incidental. It is the only job on the ship that involves holding a course rather than fighting, and it went to a forty-six-year-old who has spent longer giving orders than half his crewmates have been alive. A former Warlord at the wheel, for a captain of nineteen.
The 1.1 billion arrived with Onigashima, where Jinbe fought Who's Who — a former CP9 agent turned Beasts Pirate, posted at 546 million — in a duel between two men who had both served the World Government before leaving it through different doors.
The figure places him third in the crew, 11 million behind Zoro, which interests absolutely nobody on board except two people.
More to the point, it is the first bounty of his life that has nothing to do with Fish-Man Island, a debt, or an arrangement. The Warlord seat bought his people peace; after Whitebeard died, what was left of the Sun Pirates went to work under Big Mom, who took the island under her own flag. Jinbe spent his adult life negotiating on behalf of other people. This one prices only him.
It also settles an ambiguity running since Marineford: for years he was filed as a former Warlord, defined by what he no longer was. He had said yes to Luffy back in Totto Land and only came aboard at Wano, the time it took to walk out of an Emperor's territory without leaving his own crew behind.
