A bookkeeper’s son from Medford
Michael Rubens Bloomberg was born on February 14, 1942, at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the Brighton neighbourhood of Boston. His father, William Henry Bloomberg, was a bookkeeper for a dairy company who never earned more than about $6,000 a year; his mother, Charlotte Rubens, came from a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His paternal grandfather, Alexander “Elick” Bloomberg, was a rabbi who had come from Poland. After brief spells in Allston and Brookline, the family settled in the suburb of Medford, Massachusetts, where Michael grew up and where he lived until after college.
It was a modest, traditional home. The family kept a kosher kitchen, and Michael went to Hebrew school and celebrated his bar mitzvah. He was also a driven, competitive boy, who became an Eagle Scout at the age of twelve. He graduated from Medford High School in 1960.
Engineer and MBA
Bloomberg went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, paying his way with a National Defense student loan and campus jobs, among them, by several accounts, parking cars. He was a sociable rather than scholarly student, joined a fraternity, built the costume for the university’s Blue Jay mascot, and liked to joke that he was one of the students who made the top half of the class possible. He graduated in 1964 with a degree in electrical engineering. His father died suddenly while he was in college.
He went on to Harvard Business School, earning an MBA in 1966. That year he joined Salomon Brothers, then a rough-and-tumble Wall Street partnership, on a salary of $9,000. He moved to the equities desk and thrived. By 1972 he was a general partner, running equity trading and later the firm’s information systems, the job that would shape the rest of his life.
Fired, with ten million dollars
In 1981 the commodities trader Phibro Corporation bought Salomon Brothers, and the new management pushed Bloomberg out. He left with about $10 million for his equity in the firm. He was thirty-nine, and he could have retired or taken another senior job. Instead he made a bet based on what he had learned building Salomon’s in-house computer systems: that Wall Street would pay a premium for high-quality financial information, delivered instantly on a screen, in forms that traders could analyse for themselves.
On October 1, 1981, he founded a company called Innovative Market Systems with three former Salomon colleagues, Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan and Charles Zegar. In December 1982 they released their first product, a dedicated terminal called the Market Master that combined real-time bond prices with analytical tools. Merrill Lynch became the first customer and took a 30 per cent stake in the company for $30 million, in exchange for a five-year restriction on selling the terminal to Merrill’s competitors; Merrill lifted the restriction in 1984.
The terminal that runs the markets
The machine soon became known simply as “the Bloomberg”, and in 1986 the company renamed itself Bloomberg L.P. Its insight was to pair data with tools: users could pull up prices, compare securities, run calculations and message one another on a single dedicated system. Over the years the company added Bloomberg News, radio and television, electronic trading and, in 2009, the magazine Businessweek. By 2022 there were about 325,000 terminal subscribers worldwide, paying tens of thousands of dollars a year each, and the company employs around 20,000 people.
In practical terms, the terminal changed how money is managed. Bond traders, central bankers, fund managers and finance ministries came to rely on the same real-time data and analytics, making markets more transparent and much faster. Its success also made Bloomberg, who kept a large majority stake, one of the richest people in the world. His firm’s culture drew criticism, too: in the 1980s and 1990s it was compared to a fraternity, it faced several sexual-harassment lawsuits from female employees, and a joke pamphlet of his sayings compiled in 1990 was later condemned as sexist. He told the story of his rise, with the editor Matthew Winkler, in Bloomberg by Bloomberg (1997).
Mayor of New York
A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg switched parties to run for mayor of New York as a Republican in 2001, in a campaign upended by the September 11 attacks. He won narrowly, spending tens of millions of dollars of his own money, and took office on January 1, 2002, in a wounded city. He was re-elected in 2005, and in 2008, during the financial crisis, he persuaded the City Council to extend term limits so he could run again; he won a third term in 2009. He left the Republican Party in 2007 and governed as an independent.
His administration treated the city as a laboratory for public health and management. In 2003 New York banned smoking in all indoor workplaces, including bars and restaurants, a measure copied around the world. In 2006 it became the first American city to ban artificial trans fats in restaurants; it required chain restaurants to post calorie counts, built an extensive network of bike lanes and pedestrianised much of Times Square. He won mayoral control of the city’s schools and expanded charter schools, and in 2011 launched the $127 million Young Men’s Initiative to narrow the gaps between young Black and Latino men and their peers, giving $30 million of his own money to it. An attempt to limit the size of sugary sodas was struck down in court. The most lasting criticism concerned policing: under Bloomberg the police vastly expanded stop-and-frisk street searches, which fell overwhelmingly on Black and Latino New Yorkers; a federal court ruled that the city’s practice violated the Fourth Amendment and encouraged racial profiling. He defended the policy for years before apologising for it in November 2019.
Philanthropist on a global scale
Bloomberg signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 and has given away tens of billions of dollars, by his own organisation’s count more than $24 billion by 2025, much of it through Bloomberg Philanthropies. Its priorities include tobacco control, road safety, climate and clean energy, the arts, public health and government innovation. Its Beyond Coal campaign set out to retire much of America’s fleet of coal-fired power plants, and he has served as a United Nations special envoy on cities and climate change.
No institution has benefited more than his alma mater. Johns Hopkins’ school of public health bears his name, and in 2018 he gave the university $1.8 billion, at the time the largest gift ever to an American educational institution, so that it could admit students regardless of their ability to pay and replace loans with grants. In 2024 he added $1 billion to make medical school free for most students. Writing in 2018, he recalled that a student loan and a campus job were what had let him attend Hopkins in the first place.
Jewish life and identity
Bloomberg describes himself as living a mostly secular Jewish life: he attends synagogue chiefly on the High Holy Days, belongs to Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, and holds a Passover seder with his sister, Marjorie Tiven. But he has stayed close to the community that raised him. He endowed his childhood synagogue in Medford, which was renamed the William and Charlotte Bloomberg Jewish Community Center in honour of his parents.
In 2013 he was named the first laureate of the Genesis Prize, sometimes called the “Jewish Nobel”, which honours achievement and Jewish values; he gave the $1 million prize to a global competition for young people’s ideas to improve the world. He has been a long-standing supporter of Israel, and after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, he matched donations to Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service, giving $25 million within days.
Private life and later politics
Bloomberg married Susan Brown, a Briton, in 1975; they had two daughters, Emma and Georgina, and divorced in 1993, remaining on friendly terms. His longtime partner is Diana Taylor, a former New York State superintendent of banks. After leaving City Hall he spent a period as a full-time philanthropist, then returned to run Bloomberg L.P. in 2014.
In November 2019 he entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, funding the campaign entirely himself; his spending of more than $900 million set a record for a presidential primary campaign. He withdrew in March 2020 after winning only American Samoa on Super Tuesday, and threw his support behind Joe Biden. Britain made him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2014, and in 2024 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Legacy
Michael Bloomberg’s legacy runs on three tracks. In business, he turned a severance payment into the information system at the centre of global finance, and showed that data plus analytical tools could be worth more than either alone. In government, he left a New York that was safer, healthier and more crowded with visitors, and a sharply contested record on policing, inequality and the use of personal wealth in politics.
In philanthropy, his giving has reshaped public health and climate policy around the world. Few modern figures have been so successful in so many arenas, and fewer still have so openly argued that measurement, data and management can be turned to the public good.
Sources & further reading
Michael Bloomberg, Wikipedia · Bloomberg L.P., Wikipedia · Bloomberg gives ‘unprecedented’ $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins to boost financial aid, PBS NewsHour · Michael Bloomberg, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.