Table Of ContentBY
Bloomberg
WITH INVALUABLE HELP FROM
MATTHEW WINKLER
To
Emma and Georgina
M.B.
To
Jacob, Nathan, and Lydia
M.W.
Our attempt to answer the question, "What does Daddy do?"
Preface
On the night of November 6 last year, my family, friends, and colleagues at our company, Bloomberg
LP, gathered at a midtown restaurant and waited for the results of New York City's mayoral election.
Five months earlier, I ignored the warnings of so many wise men and women and took the plunge by
running for office. I had always said that if I ever got the chance to go into politics, being mayor was
at the top of my list and a natural extension of my experience as the chief executive of Bloomberg.
It had been 20 years since we started the company in a small room on Madison Avenue-refugees
from Wall Street motivated by an idea that we could build something new that just might make a
difference in the world of money and investing. We were too young and too insignificant for anyone
to warn us then that we were crazy to think we could create a company that could challenge the
giants of financial media. So we didn't hesitate. Within a year, we had our first customer and five
years later, our first overseas office. By 1989, our annual sales were approaching $100 million and
there were now more than 400 of us selling a machine that had a small, growing following.
We kept building. From a bond product, we branched out into stocks, commodities, and news. We
added magazines, radio, and television-all tethered to the 24-hour machine-that made us unique as a
multimedia company catering to the people with the most at stake. Within Bloomberg, we were
never satisfied and that drove us to work harder and build more. Whether we made our luck or luck
made us, by May 1997 as Bloomberg by Bloomberg hit the bookstores, we were able to install our
75,000th Bloomberg computer terminal, bringing our annual sales to $1.3 billion.
Even as the dot-com boom became a bust and the economy soured in 2001, we continued to grow,
bringing the paid-up number of Bloomberg users to 164,000 and our annual sales to nearly $3
billion. Our staff climbed to 8,000 in 108 offices, serving customers in 126 countries. But our
success continues to be derived mostly from one thing: our own people. They will always be our
most important asset and, if there is anything that defines our company, it is an awareness that
nothing is more important than customer service. The only way to have the best customer service is
treat our people the best.
That's what drove me in business and that's what motivated me to consider public service an
extension of my career as a chief executive. An hour after the polls closed on Election Day last
November, I still didn't know who the winner was. Win or lose, I was glad to have made the race. It
is only by doing what many say is difficult or impossible that we achieve.
There is no substitute for the simultaneous sense of humility and inspiration that I enjoyed when I
took the oath of office and became the 108th mayor of New York City. There are difficult times
ahead. September 11th will forever be remembered for the unprecedented sorrow and destruction
visited on New York. But it also will become part of a new chapter for the city and the nation in
which freedom emerges from this tragedy stronger than ever.
Whatever I have achieved until this point, I like to think that it helped prepare me for the challenge
of uniting our public sector, corporate community, labor force, academic institutions, and
philanthropic and cultural organizations. The story that follows is about building partnerships,
shared vision, and, ultimately, sharing the rewards.
Bloomberg by Bloomberg is about becoming the best and I want to assure every reader of this book,
the best is yet to come.
MIKE BLOOMBERG
New York, New York
February 2002
Contents
Chapter 1 The Last Supper 1
The Thrill of Getting Fired: Tarrytown 1981
Chapter 2 Capitalism, Here I Come 9
School, Work, and Hard Knocks
Chapter 3 I Love Mondays 39
Entrepreneurship: Vocation and Avocation
Chapter 4 We Can Do That 67
Elementary Journalism, Not Rocket Science
Chapter 5 "No" Is No Answer 91
Establishment Ignorance and Arrogance
Chapter 6 Money Talks 111
Textbook Multimedia
Chapter 7 Computers for Virgins 131
Technology: Politics and Promises
Chapter 8 Management 101 159
The Bloomberg Way
Chapter 9 Coming Up Next 185
America's a Wonderful Country
Chapter 10 Out of the Office 203
Character and Consistency
Chapter 11 Wealth, Wisdom, and Work 227
Philanthropy and Public Service
Afterword 251
Index 253
The Last Supper
The Thrill of Getting Fired:
Tarrytown 1981
So there I was, thirty-nine years old and essentially hearing, "Here's $10 million; you're history."
One summer morning, John Gutfreund, managing partner of Wall Street's hottest firm, and Henry
Kaufman, then the world's most influential economist, told me my life at Salomon Brothers was
finished.
"Time for you to leave," said John.
On Saturday, August 1, 1981, I was terminated from the only fulltime job I'd ever known and from
the high-pressure life I loved. This, after fifteen years of twelve-hour days and six-day weeks.
Out!
For a decade and a half, I'd been an integral part of the country's most successful securities trading
firm, even of Wall Street itself. Not just in my head. If my press was to be believed, in everyone's.
Suddenly, though, needed no longer. I was a general partner. An owner rather than an employee.
Nevertheless:
Fired!
I wasn't going to know what was happening, wasn't going to be making decisions, wasn't going to
share in "my" company's profits and losses, wasn't going to be part of it at all. "We" had become
"them and me."
"What do you think about us selling the company?" asked Henry.
"If I'm being thrown out, better now than later," I replied.
Of course, there was the $10 million I was getting. America's a wonderful country.
The Salomon Brothers Executive Committee had decided to merge the seventy-one-year-old
partnership with a publicly held commodities trading firm, Phibro Corporation (previously part of
Engelhard Minerals and Chemicals). We found this out on a hot, summer Friday night at a hastily
called, "mandatory attendance, utmost-secrecy required," mysterious partners' meeting at the
Tarrytown Conference Center, the former New York estate of society hostess Mary Duke Biddle.
Security guards surrounded the complex, checking in each participant as he arrived. (Unfortunately,
security missed seeing a Fortune magazine photographer who'd been tipped off and was hiding in a
tree. So much for confidentiality!) For sixty-three of us, it was our last meeting as Salomon partners
and the occasion when Gutfreund and Kaufman told me my time at Salomon Brothers was over.
We got together in a big conference room before dinner. Expensive lawyers and accountants, being
paid at overtime rates, hovered to the side. Exchanging furtive glances, they oozed a nervousness,
perhaps in fear that some prewritten script would go awry. Tables and chairs were arranged in rows
with the Executive Committee seated in front, facing "the troops." At each partner's seat was a dark
gray personalized leather folder. I sat at my assigned place and, though we had been told to wait,
like everyone else I immediately opened the book in front of me. The first enclosures were financial
projections for our company after a proposed merger with Phibro, this almost unknown oil, metals,
and agricultural commodities dealer. Pro forma income statements, balance sheets, legal documents,
and other corporate gibberish were attached. But the second presentation in the book was infinitely
more interesting: the effect of the deal on me as an individual. It meant millions of dollars in my
pocket!
The pointless speeches went on and on. The Executive Committee was determined to sell the assets
of the Salomon partnership. This transaction was a foregone conclusion: The process, a jury trial
parody, where witnesses saw the accused pull the trigger, no mitigating circumstances are entered as
evidence, and the judge instructs the jurors to deliberate. Everybody walks into the jury room and
the foreman asks, "Did he do it?"
Twelve people instantaneously answer, "Guilty."
"Let's go back."
"We can't. We've got to give the accused some consideration. Let's sit around and talk for an hour."
So at Tarrytown we talked for sixty minutes. We were solemn. We were serious. Some asked about
differences in corporate culture, others about earnings potential, a few about management structure
and duplication of staff functions.
Irrelevant! The Executive Committee wanted this merger and could have voted it through on its own.
Yes, we were presented with a fait accompli. But, make no mistake. There was 100 percent
approval from the rest of the general partners. Nobody in that meeting gave a moment's thought to
rejecting the sale, including me. It was such a lucrative deal for us, as owners.
By the time we sat down to eat, everything was said and done. We were all as serious and
businesslike as we possibly could be while trying to stifle the enormous grins on our faces.
Everybody attending this meeting was now wealthy beyond his dreams. Previously, partners' money
had just been numbers in a capital account ledger book, "funny money." We could give it to charity,
or retire, and wait another ten years to get at it. Other than that (and 5 percent interest paid out to us
yearly), our fortune was only on paper. That was then. But this was now. All of a sudden, it was
real. And ours. In our pockets. In cash!
We were told not to tell anyone until the public announcement the coming Monday. Nobody, inside
the company or outside, had known that a sale was even being considered. (Still, my friend and
partner Bob Salomon guessed, the day before, that whatever was brewing involved Phibro Corp. He
