Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg is an American businessman and politician. He is the majority owner and co-founder of Bloomberg L.P., and was its CEO from 1981 to 2001, and again from 2014 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 109th mayor of New York City for three terms, from 2002 to 2013, and was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Bloomberg is a centibillionaire, worth $109.4 billion as of December 2025, making him the 17th richest person in the world.
Bloomberg grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, and graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts. He began his career at the securities brokerage firm Salomon Brothers, before forming his own company in 1981. That company, Bloomberg L.P., is a financial information, software, and media firm that is known for its Bloomberg Terminal. Bloomberg spent the next twenty years as its chairman and CEO. Bloomberg, who has signed the Giving Pledge, has given away $17.4 billion to philanthropic causes in his lifetime. After a brief stint as a full-time philanthropist, he re-assumed the position of CEO at Bloomberg L.P. by the end of 2014.
Bloomberg was elected the 109th mayor of New York City in 2001. He held office for three consecutive terms, winning re-election in 2005 and 2009. Pursuing socially liberal and fiscally moderate policies, Bloomberg developed a technocratic managerial style.
As the mayor of New York, Bloomberg established public charter schools, rebuilt urban infrastructure, and supported gun control, public health initiatives, and environmental protections. He also led a re-zoning of large areas of the city, which facilitated massive and widespread new commercial and residential construction after the September 11 attacks. Bloomberg is considered to have had far-reaching influence on the politics, business sector, and culture of New York City during his three terms as mayor. He has also faced significant criticism for the city's stop-and-frisk program, support for which he reversed with an apology before his 2020 presidential run.
In November 2019, four months before Super Tuesday, Bloomberg officially launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States in the 2020 election. He ended his campaign in March 2020, after having won only 61 delegates. Bloomberg self-funded $935 million for his candidacy, which set the record for the most expensive presidential primary campaign and highest spending in any political capacity by a single individual in U.S. history. In 2024, Bloomberg received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden.
Early life and education
Bloomberg was born on February 14, 1942, at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, to William Henry Bloomberg, a bookkeeper for a dairy company, and Charlotte Bloomberg. His father never earned more than $6,000 a year. William Henry Bloomberg died suddenly when his son was in college. The Bloomberg Center at the Harvard Business School was named in William Henry's honor. Bloomberg's family is Jewish, and he is a member of the Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. Bloomberg's paternal grandfather, Rabbi Alexander "Elick" Bloomberg, was a Polish Jew. Bloomberg's maternal grandfather, Max Rubens, was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant from present-day Belarus, and his maternal grandmother was born in New York to Lithuanian Jewish parents.The family lived in Allston until Bloomberg was two years old, followed by Brookline, Massachusetts, for two years, finally settling in the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts, where he lived until after he graduated from college.
Bloomberg became an Eagle Scout when he was twelve years old. He graduated from Medford High School in 1960. He went on to attend Johns Hopkins University, where he joined the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi. While there, he constructed the blue jay costume for the university's mascot. He graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree in electrical engineering. In 1966, he graduated from Harvard Business School with a Master of Business Administration degree.
Bloomberg is a member of Kappa Beta Phi and Tau Beta Pi. He wrote an autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, with help from Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler.
Business career
In 1966, Bloomberg was hired for a job earning $9,000 per year at Salomon Brothers, a large Wall Street investment bank. Salomon Brothers later promoted him to the equities desk. Bloomberg became a general partner at Salomon Brothers in 1972; he headed equity trading and, later, systems development. Phibro Corporation bought Salomon Brothers in 1981, and the new management fired Bloomberg, paying him $10 million for his equity in the firm.Using the money he received from Phibro, Bloomberg—having designed in-house computerized financial systems for Salomon—set up a data services company named Innovative Market Systems based on his belief that Wall Street would pay a premium for high-quality business information, delivered instantaneously on computer terminals in a variety of usable formats. The company sold customized computer terminals that delivered real-time market data, financial calculations and other analytics to Wall Street firms. The terminal, first called the Market Master terminal, was released to market in December 1982.
In 1986, IMS renamed itself Bloomberg L.P. Over the years, ancillary products including Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg Message, and Bloomberg Tradebook were launched. Bloomberg, L.P. had revenues of approximately $10 billion in 2018. As of 2019, the company has more than 325,000 terminal subscribers worldwide and employs 20,000 people in dozens of locations.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Bloomberg L.P. has been compared to a fraternity, with employees bragging in the company's office about their sexual exploits. The company was sued four times by female employees for sexual harassment, including one incident in which a victim claimed to have been raped. To celebrate Bloomberg's 48th birthday, colleagues published a pamphlet entitled The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg. Among various sayings that were attributed to him, several have subsequently been criticized as sexist or misogynistic. Among the contents of the 1990 publication are a suggestion that if women wanted to be known for their intelligence, they would spend less time at Bloomingdale's and more at the library; as well as a joke that if Bloomberg terminals could provide oral sex, it would put female employees out of work. Bloomberg's staff told the New York Times that he now regrets having made such "disrespectful" remarks.
When he left the position of CEO to pursue a political career as the mayor of New York City, Bloomberg was replaced by Lex Fenwick and later by Daniel L. Doctoroff, after his initial service as deputy mayor under Bloomberg. After completing his final term as the mayor of New York City, Bloomberg spent his first eight months out of office as a full-time philanthropist. In fall 2014, he announced that he would return to Bloomberg L.P. as CEO at the end of 2014, succeeding Doctoroff, who had led the company since February 2008. Bloomberg resigned as CEO of Bloomberg L.P. to run for president in 2019.
In January 2024, John P. Angelos reached a $1.725 billion deal to sell the Baltimore Orioles to a group led by David Rubenstein. The group included Bloomberg, former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Cal Ripken, New York investment manager Michael Arougheti and NBA legend Grant Hill.
Wealth
In March 2009, Forbes reported Bloomberg's wealth at $16 billion, a gain of $4.5 billion over the previous year, the world's biggest increase in wealth from 2008 to 2009. Bloomberg moved from 142nd to 17th in the Forbes list of the world's billionaires in only two years. In the 2019 Forbes list of the world's billionaires, he was the ninth-richest person; his net worth was estimated at $55.5 billion. In 2021, Bloomberg's net worth was estimated at $106 billion, ranking him 12th on Forbes list of billionaires.Political career
Mayor of New York City
Bloomberg assumed office as the 109th mayor of New York City on January 1, 2002. He won re-election in 2005, and again in 2009. As mayor, he initially struggled with approval ratings as low as 24 percent, but he subsequently developed, and maintained, high approval ratings. Bloomberg joined Rudy Giuliani, John Lindsay, and Fiorello La Guardia as re-elected Republican mayors in the mostly Democratic city.Bloomberg stated that he wanted public education reform to be the legacy of his first term, and addressing poverty to be the legacy of his second.
Bloomberg chose to apply a statistical, metrics-based management approach to city government, and granted departmental commissioners' broad autonomy in their decision-making. Breaking with 190 years of tradition, he implemented what New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney called a "bullpen" open office plan, similar to a Wall Street trading floor, in which dozens of aides and managerial staff are seated together in a large chamber. The design is intended to promote accountability and accessibility.
Bloomberg accepted a remuneration of $1 annually, in lieu of the mayoral salary.
File:Primer Foro Latinoamericano Bloomberg Auspiciando la Alianza del Pacífico..jpg|thumb|Bloomberg with presidents of Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Mexico in 2014
As mayor, Bloomberg turned the city's $6 billion budget deficit into a $3 billion surplus, largely by raising property taxes. Bloomberg increased city funding for the new development of affordable housing through a plan that created and preserved an estimated 160,000 affordable homes in the city. In 2003, he implemented a successful smoking ban in all indoor workplaces, including bars and restaurants, and many other cities and states followed suit. On December 5, 2006, New York City became the first city in the United States to ban trans-fat from all restaurants. This went into effect in July 2008, and has since been adopted in many other cities and countries. Bloomberg created bicycle lanes, required chain restaurants to post calorie counts, and pedestrianized much of Times Square. In 2011, Bloomberg launched the NYC Young Men's Initiative, a $127 million initiative to support programs and policies designed to address disparities between young Black and Latino men and their peers, and personally donated $30 million to the project. In 2010, Bloomberg supported the then-controversial Islamic complex near Ground Zero.
Under the Bloomberg Administration, the New York City Police Department greatly expanded its stop-and-frisk program, with a six-fold increase in documented stops. The policy was challenged in U.S. Federal Court, which ruled that the city's implementation of the policy violated citizens' rights under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and encouraged racial profiling. Bloomberg's administration appealed the ruling; however, his successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, dropped the appeal and allowed the ruling to take effect. After the September 11 attacks, with assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, Bloomberg's administration oversaw a controversial program that surveilled Muslim communities on the basis of their religion, ethnicity, and language. The program was discontinued in 2014.
In a January 2014 Quinnipiac poll, 64 percent of voters called Bloomberg's 12 years as mayor "mainly a success".