Michael Rubens Bloomberg was born on February 14, 1942, Valentine’s Day, in a working-class neighborhood from Boston, in a middle-class family.
He is an American businessman and politician, founder of the information services emporium that bears his name and mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013.
Mike Bloomberg Biography
His father was an accountant and his mother a housewife, but young Mike already showed from his childhood that he was capable of flanking any obstacle to get out of mediocrity.
Thanks to a scholarship, he graduated from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, although he obtained his doctorate from Harvard University, which, along with Yale, is the American university from which the most presidents of the country have come.
In the summer of 1966 the well-known firm Salomon Brothers took over his services. That was when he learned what it really meant to work on Wall Street.
He soon became the supervisor of all stock movements, sales and information systems of the company. His worth was such that the firm made him a partner six years later. The bad news came in 1981, when the Phibro Corporation took over Salomon Brothers and found itself out of work for the first time.
Actually, the news was not so bad, because he was awarded ten million dollars. So, with all that capital, he founded Bloomberg, LP, a company dedicated to selling financial data and information to Wall Street traders in real time and with interactive possibilities.
It was a pioneering idea that caught on immediately because, in addition, it was accompanied by news, also in real time, about the baseball league, the sport that arouses the most passions in the United States. His first serious business was in 1982: he sold twenty subscriptions for his financial terminal to the Merrill Lynch company. Two decades later he already had 160,000 subscribers all over the world.
The billionaire stands at a height of 5ft 7in or 1.70m. He certainly isn’t the tallest man in America or the world, but where money and fame count, Michael Bloomberg towers comfortably above many others.
Mike Blommberg Career
The fat benefits did not make Michael Bloomberg sit in his office and count the dollars he earned a day. On the contrary, convinced that information is power and at the same time business, in 1990 he created the financial news service Bloomberg News. Like all of his business ventures, success was not long in coming.
So much so that in 2001 it had around 1,500 journalists spread over the 80 offices it had open on five continents. The competition, such as the Reuters or Telerate agencies, took almost ten years to copy the idea, more than enough time for the business of the future mayor of New York to consolidate.
The foundation of the company Bloomberg News was followed by Bloomberg Radio and, as it could not be otherwise, fortune did not turn its back on his new adventure either. The first broadcast took place in 1993 in the city of skyscrapers.
The content of the broadcasts, which could eventually be heard on another 200 stations that partnered with Bloomberg Radio, was news related to the financial markets. At the same time, it became the pioneer station in offering information on financial affairs in the Afro-American and Latino communities. Another great idea for a man who never lost his nose for business.
Mike Bloomberg Power And Popularity
However, success in his professional life did not accompany him on a personal level. Divorced and with two daughters, to separate from his wife he claimed that he liked to go to parties a lot. It was not in vain that he was one of the characters that appeared the most in the pink press in his country, and his love affairs were paid for at the price of gold in the big publications.
But the failure on the sentimental plane had no repercussions at all on his business. In fact, he was the world’s leading provider of financial news, data and analysis via television, radio, the Internet and specialized publications. All this, translated into numbers, is equivalent to operating in 126 countries and employing almost eight thousand people.
To understand even better the power of the mayor of New York, we should refer to the page bloomberg.com, which in 2001 was the fourth most visited. And it is that every month it received the visit of almost eight million Internet users. Cable television also brought him a healthy income. He reached 200 million homes and could be seen and heard in seven different languages ​​(English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese) in 350,000 hotel rooms around the world.
His desire to innovate led him to ensure that the economic news on the small screen were not excessively boring for the general public. With Bloomberg Television, the multi-screen format was consolidated, that is, the image was divided to present at the same time the price of the main stock markets in the world, graphs on the evolution of exchange rates or the prices of raw materials and the headlines with the main news of the day.
Mike Bloomberg Philanthropy And Politics
Before embarking on his political career, Bloomberg already spent much of his time dealing with philanthropic and civic affairs. His obsession was to improve the education that young people received, medical services and to promote people’s access to the world of art.
Those were perhaps the reasons that led him to found a program to help victims of domestic violence in New York or to promote the Children’s Health Fund’s Mobile Medical Unit, thanks to which children from homeless families are cared for. He also did not want to forget the most disadvantaged young people and financially supported the construction of sports facilities in various public schools in the city.
But it is that, in addition, Bloomberg was the director of the Committee of Trustees of Johns Hopkins, the university where he studied. He led a campaign to raise funds and to set an example, which of course was not followed by anyone, he gave 100 million dollars, of which a third was destined to increase financial aid to students with few resources.
Very few understood that a man who had achieved everything on Wall Street would slam the door of his business life to get into politics. Even less understandable was that the Republicans put him as a headliner to become the 108th mayor of New York, when Bloomberg had always declared himself a Democrat.
But Michael Bloomberg was in the mood for a fight; in fact, he always had them. Backed by Rudolph Giuliani, who was forced to step down as mayor of New York after eight years in office, he won a victory for Republicans in a city that traditionally voted Democratic.
The thing had its merit, since for the first time in history a man with no experience in politics took control of the baton in the city of skyscrapers. The fifty million dollars that he disbursed during the electoral campaign also had a great influence.
A supporter of abortion but opposed to the death penalty, Bloomberg had before him the challenge of raising a morally and economically sunken city after the attacks of September 11, 2001 .
One of his first tasks was to restore the southern area of ​​Manhattan damaged after that date (the so-called Ground Zero) and prevent financial firms from leaving the city. In addition, he had to face the largest fiscal deficit in the history of the Big Apple, which some experts calculated would reach 3,000 million dollars in the next fiscal year.
Bloomberg has achieved success in a field in which other American billionaires such as Ross Perot or Steve Forbes failed miserably: politics. Although there are those who still insist that money is not everything, in the case of the new mayor of New York it did open the doors to achieve goals such as carrying the baton in the city of skyscrapers without having any experience in the world of politics.
He is a self-made man, something that fascinates a society like the United States, obsessed with looking in the mirror and seeing in it the hero he admires and pays tribute to.
Like Bill Gates , Carlos Slim , Amancio Ortega or Mark Zuckerberg , since the beginning of the new millennium he has become a regular in the lists of the richest men in the world published by Forbes magazine; in 2018 he was in eleventh position. Quite a success story for someone who started as a valet to pay for his studies, and who has ended up embodying the archetypal values ​​of the American self-made man .
Mike Bloomberg Net Worth
Michael Bloomberg Net Worth: Michael Bloomberg is an American politician and entrepreneur who has a net worth of $56 billion.
When Michael Bloomberg joined investment bank Salomon Brothers in 1966, he earned $9,000 a year, but because of his wise investment decisions after leaving the company with a $10 million severance package in 1981, he has amassed a wealth net of approximately $45.2 billion. This has secured him a place as one of the richest people in the United States and the entire world.
Mike Bloomberg Personal Life
The American businessman, politician, philanthropist and author has been married twice with the first ending in divorce. Bloomberg was married for the first time to a British woman named Susan Elizabeth Barbara Brown, and with her he had two daughters; Emma (born 1979, now married to Christopher Frissora, son of billionaire businessman Mark Frissora) and Georgina (born 1983).
However, 10 years after their youngest son was born, the couple divorced. Bloomberg maintains that they have remained best friends ever since.
Starting in 2000, the billionaire business mogul found solace in the arms of Diana Taylor, a New York state banking superintendent with whom he has been living ever since.
