New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of the biggest names in business and politics in America, and perhaps the world. 
According to Forbes, he has an estimated personal fortune of $19.5bn, which makes him the 12th richest person in the US, and the 30th richest in the world. In 2009 he won a third term in office as mayor of New York, having successfully campaigned for a change to the law that only allows mayors to serve for two terms before stepping down. Such is his standing in the world of politics that he has been talked about as a future president of the USA. In 2007, Time magazine listed him as the 39th most influential person in the world, and that same year, Vanity Fair ranked him 9th in a similar list.
Bloomberg was born into a Massachusetts-based Jewish family in 1942, the son of a real estate agent. After leaving school, he studied electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Boston, and paid his tuition fees by working as a parking attendant, and he then went on to receive an MBA from Harvard Business School.
At the age of 24, he went to New York to work for a Wall Street investment bank called Salomon Brothers, initially as an equities trader, but he soon rose through the ranks to become their head of systems development. Salomon Brothers was bought out in 1981, and Bloomberg was fired with a $10m severance package, which he used to set up a new company called Innovative Market Systems. The aim of the company was to capitalise on the fact that the finance industry was willing to pay for high quality, timely business information in a wide variety of forms, such as graphs of very specific trends. His first customer was Merrill Lynch, who installed 22 of the firm’s terminals and invested $30m in the company.
In 1986, he changed the name of the company to Bloomberg LP, and by the following year it had installed over 5,000 terminals. The firm diversified into providing other products such as as the trading platform Bloomberg Tradebook, the Bloomberg Messaging Service, and the Bloomberg Newswire. His vision for the company was to use emerging technologies to bring greater efficiency and transparency to financial services firms.
Bloomberg LP subscribers can access a range of sophisticated trading tools, including complex commodities pricing and data, debt and credit market investment analytical tools, legal, regulatory and compliance platforms, valuation tools for listed and OTC derivatives, portfolio analytics, pharmaceutical and biotech search engines, and real time market coverage. As of 2009, over 250,000 Bloomberg terminals were installed worldwide, and the information provided by the firm is used to make decisions that affect billions of dollars of trades every day.
Bloomberg also diversified into providing a number of media outlets, including the only worldwide 24-hour business and financial television network Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg.com, and a range of magazines including Business Week. In addition, their newswire is used to provide content for newspapers, websites, and other media outlets around the world.
In keeping with the firm’s stated mission of innovation, clarity, transparency, and empowerment, Bloomberg instituted a modern corporate culture that set them apart from other firms. From the open-plan ‘bullpen’ style seating for all employees (including the CEO) to their policy of investing in and supporting their employees, Bloomberg set an example that has been followed with great success by many innovative firms, such as PayPal and Google.
However, revolutionizing the worlds of business and finance were not enough for Michael Bloomberg. He wanted widespread public admiration as well. In his own words, ‘Adulation is great’. To this end, he abandoned the running of the firm he founded in 1981 to embark on a political career in 2001, running for the office of mayor of New York city. Although he had been a registered Democrat prior to the campaign, he ran on a joint Republican and Independence Party ticket for the duration of the campaign. His campaign was an expensive one, and he had to fund the $73m campaigning costs (five times that of his Democrat adversary Mark Green) out of his own pocket, due to strict laws regarding political donations in New York. His main campaigning argument was that, in the wake of the September 11th attacks, New York needed someone with top-level business experience to help the city get back on its feet. He won the post by a narrow margin, and became the first Republican mayor to succeed another Republican in the history of the office, replacing the popular Rudi Giuliani.
His tenure as mayor has been marked by fiscal prudency and liberal social policies. When he was elected, the city had a $6bn deficit, but by the time of the 2009 election, he had turned this around into a $3bn surplus. His left-leaning political views, such as his pro-choice stance on abortion, his opposition to the death penalty, his pro-gay marriage views, and his support for tighter gun laws, saw him fall out with the Republican party, and he stood as an independent candidate in the 2005 election.
He refuses to accept a salary for the role, and earns a nominal $1 per year for his services as mayor. He claims to ride the subway to work every day, although he has often been spotted being chauffeur-driven in NYPD-owned SUVs to an express train station in order to avoid having to use the local trains. During a strike by public transport workers, he famously rode a bicycle through the streets of Manhattan to demonstrate that the city would not be brought to a standstill by industrial action. He is also famed for his strong anti-tobacco stance, having brought in an indoor smoking ban in his first term, and more recently (and controversially) introducing an outdoor smoking ban.
Depending on who you talk to, Mayor Bloomberg is either a clear-headed, non-partisan leader who bases decisions on fact rather than sentiment or party politics, or a heartless, autocratic killjoy who runs the city like a Fortune 500 company. He has certainly taken some elements of his approach to business into the political world with him, most notably by introducing open-plan seating to the city offices in an attempt to promote accountability and accessility, and by insisting that schools improve performances year on year if they are to continue to receive funding. Love him or loathe him, you can’t deny that he has been, and continues to be, one of the most influential and powerful people in the worlds of politics and business over the last 30 years. Who knows, in a few years time, we might be referring to him as ‘President Bloomberg’.
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