Bloomberg told Trump ‘to hire smarter than you’
BLOOMBERG founder and former Mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg told Donald Trump to hire people more intelligent than himself after the businessman and reality TV star was elected US President.
Mr Bloomberg was speaking in Dublin yesterday at the launch of a new €80m building at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), designed to provided advanced healthcare education.
The Boston-born businessman (76) is one of the wealthiest people in the world and has embarked on a major philanthropic programme.
“The only time I talked to Donald Trump after he got elected was he let it be known that he wanted to get a call from me, so I called him,” Mr Bloomberg told an audience at RCSI yesterday.
“He said what should he do and I said, ‘Build a team. Hire the best people because you don’t know anything about this job’.”
“He said, ‘Yes, I do’, and I said, ‘No, you don’t. You’re somebody coming in from outside, but there are ways that you still can be effective if you get the right people. So go out and get the smartest people, get people who are smarter than you are. And he informed me that there was nobody that fit that bill.”
Mr Bloomberg founded the financial data, software and media company that bears his name in 1981, building it into a vital cog in the business world’s infrastructure. Public health is an important part of his philanthropy.
He said the RCSI building, located at 26 York Street in Dublin, would “help raise the bar for teaching institutions around the world, which can save millions of lives”.
He added that decreasing preventable deaths – from illnesses caused by smoking for example – was “the most urgent healthcare challenge of our time”.
“It’s hard to raise money for public health. Nobody pays for the preventive stuff although it makes a lot more sense to do that than to try and cure you afterwards,” Mr Bloomberg said.
“The school of public health is my great love. We have a slogan – ‘saving lives a million at a time’ – and you really do make a difference.”
Mr Bloomberg said the number of cranes on the Dublin skyline was a positive sign.
“Things must be going well, that’s a good measure... you’ve got to have people wanting to build, wanting to invest, wanting to try new things.”