MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, 75 The dastardly Mr Deedesis Big shot of the week
CAN you imagine Sir Richard Branson or Sir James Dyson standing up in Times Square and telling the American electorate how foolish they were?
It’d be touch and go if they made it back over Manhattan’s George Washington Bridge alive.
But when Michael Bloomberg told an audience in the City this week that Brexit was the ‘single stupidest thing a country has ever done’ certain corners of our establishment reacted as though his words had fallen from the mouth of a Greek oracle.
Elites, you see, fawn over Bloomberg. Presidential candidates lust after his imprimatur. Prime Ministers and Chancellors desperately seek out his company to show voters they’re rolling with the big guns.
With an estimated £46bn to his name, thanks to his eponymous financial news services firm, Bloomberg possesses the world’s 10th largest fortune and a gargantuan-sized ego to match.
He is the former New York Mayor who bossily implemented the smoking ban on the Big Apple and ordered its restaurants to publish calorie counts on their menus. HE
twice successfully stood – in 2001 and 2005 on the Republican ticket – despite having been a Democrat for 25 years, making the cold calculation that the Republican candidates weren’t up to much. Although City laws limited officials to two terms, Bloomberg stood again in 2009, this time as an independent, claiming the City needed leadership following the financial crisis.
Do we detect a touch of the Tony Blairs in this brazen political chi- canery? Strangely, with that finely creased face and cruel mouth, you could see Blair as his doppelganger in a few years’ time.
Though unlike the former PM, there’s little Bloomberg charisma to speak of.
He’s no Cicero at the podium either, with a tendency to speak too fast and crack self-deprecating jokes which get lost in the telling.
He began his career at Salomon Brothers, the notorious 1980s Wall Street bank whose bigwigs provided the inspiration for Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities.
He joined in 1972 fresh from Harvard, starting off in the bank’s vault counting bond certificates.
In his 1997 autobiography, he describes sweating away in cramped un-air-conditioned space in his underwear ‘with an occasional six-pack of beer to make it more bearable’.
He rose through the ranks to become head of equity trading and sales. In 1981 the company restructured and he was fired, albeit with a $10m pay-off.
Reckoning the financial services industry would be willing to pay for high-quality financial informa- tion, he set up Innovative Market Systems, a subscription-based news service which he renamed Bloomberg in 1986.
He became Mayor after overturning a 25-point deficit. Crucially he won the backing of the incumbent Rudy Giuliani, who was to guide the City through the 9/11 atrocities just before polling day, though it also didn’t hurt that Bloomberg was able to splash out $20m of his own fortune on his campaign, outspending all of the other candidates put together.
Since flirting with a run at the White House in 2008, he now busies himself with his charity work. He’s given away $4.5bn, and he and his partner, banker Diana Taylor, remain fixtures on the New York philanthropy circuit.
He’s pledged to give away his fortune upon his death, though it’s unlikely his two grown-up daughters from his marriage to Yorkshire-born Susan Brown, which ended in 1993, will go short.
In the meantime, Bloomberg’s lifestyle is hardly restrained. He and Diana live in a beautiful beauxarts townhouse on the Upper East Side next door to singer Art Garfunkel, with further homes in Lon- don, Paris, Hong Kong and Bermuda and a fleet of private planes.
That said, there was an endearing story a few years back when an eagle-eyed New York Post reporter spotted that he only owned two pairs of shoes. Perhaps this rare nod to frugality is a hangover from his modest upbringing in Boston, where he was raised by his bookkeeper father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, of all places.
‘Stupidest thing a country has ever done’? Bloomberg Senior might have had a few things to say about that.