Billionaire Bloomberg says making a ton
appiness can’t buy money.”
It’s one of Mike Bloomberg’s favorite jokes, but he’s not kidding. Having a good time didn’t get him through two Ivy League schools. It didn’t make his name on Wall Street or help his startup take off. It didn’t make him a billionaire.
But with that money, he was able to buy a lot of happiness.
Much of it, Eleanor Randolph’s “The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg” suggests, was for other people.
Bloomberg grew up middle-class and learned vital lessons from both parents. His mother, a hard-charging forceof-nature, taught him determination. His father, a mild-mannered accountant who never made more than $6,000 a year, but always wrote a check to the NAACP, taught him an equally valuable lesson: Give back.
Born in Boston in 1942, Bloomberg was a pint-size troublemaker from the start. Only two things could make him behave – the chance to add another Boy Scout badge or a promised trip to a science museum.
Those twin urges, for competition and knowledge, remained his guideposts for life. But when his father died while Bloomberg was in college, something in him shifted. After leaving Johns Hopkins with an engineering degree, he switched to Harvard Business School.
He knew he would never be a great engineer, he said. And he knew smart business people made money.
He didn’t, right away. His first job was on Wall Street, at Salomon Brothers & Hutzler, in 1966. It paid $9,000, and he negotiated a $2,500 loan. The job meant sitting in “the cage” and counting paper.
“We slaved in our underwear, in an un-airconditioned bank vault, with an occasional sixpack of beer to make it more bearable,” Bloomberg recalled. “Every afternoon, we counted out billions of dollars in actual bond and stock certificates to be messengered to banks for collateral as overnight loans.”
Then, the next morning when the papers came back, Bloomberg and his fellow wage workers returned to the steamy bank vault and started counting again.
That was the way business on Wall Street was done then, by hand. If someone needed a copy of something, you used carbon paper. If they needed it in a hurry and they were on another floor, you put it in a basket and lowered it out the window on a rope.
Bloomberg, the proud president of his high school’s Slide Rule Club, knew there was a better way. During his 15 years at the firm, as he rose higher and higher, he talked louder and louder about bringing in computers.
His bosses weren’t convinced, but then his know-it-all cockiness and Ivy League degrees always alienated some of the old guard. When the firm sold in 1981, he was fired. But he was given his accumulated share of profits: $10 million.
He took it, and a few friends, and started a company selling the new Bloomberg Terminal, his data-delivery system. It would become essential in finance and make him the richest man in New York.
So why not run New York? He first ran for mayor in 2001. It was an improbable campaign. A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg switched parties, figuring the Republican primary was easier. He handily beat the ever-hopeful Herman Badillo.
No one expected Bloomberg to win the mayoral race. The GOP had ruled New York for eight years under Rudy Giuliani. People seemed to want a change.
What they didn’t want, however, was the abrasive Democratic nominee, Mark Green. Bloomberg squeaked by, winning 744,757 votes to Green’s 709,268.
Clearly, Bloomberg would be a different kind of mayor. He had spent years on Wall Street, where insults, foul language and crude sexual come-ons were part of the macho culture. Some women complained life was no better at his company.
Bloomberg toned it down a bit in public, but his bluntness could still startle. Asked if he had ever smoked marijuana, he responded, “You bet I did. And I enjoyed it.” While raising the city’s real estate tax, he refused to target the wealthy, or even criticize them.
“We love the rich people,” he said. “If you make more money, you deserve more money.”
The critical difference between him and other billionaires? Bloomberg wasn’t