Eleanor Randolph - The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2019 by Eleanor Randolph

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2019

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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui

Jacket design by Jackie Seow

Jacket photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux Pictures

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-4767-7220-2

ISBN 978-1-4767-7222-6 (ebook)

For Peter and Victoria

I dont have anything in common with people who stand on escalators. I always walk up themwhy waste time? You have eternity to rest when you die.

Michael Bloomberg, 2014

W hen billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced that he was running for mayor of New York in June 2001, the citys pundits scoffed. Kinda goofy, said one. Sure, he could overwhelm the citys airwaves and mailboxes with expensive commercials, they noted, and voters could be reminded that he was a generous donor to city charities big and small. But this was a vanity project, the experts decided, another rich mans expensive hobby.

Yet, these doubters were soon confounded by two important realities. First, they had underestimated how a driven Michael Bloomberg would use his energy and his money to achieve his latest goal. They had misjudged him as a tin-eared and boring novice, and they had missed the complex and relentlessly ambitious salesman underneath. As Bloomberg emerged as the billionaire candidate that year, he was not sitting on a yacht somewhere, offering his latest political whims by long distance. He was out there shaking hands and freely granting interviews, studying polls, and giving some of the worst political speeches New Yorkers had heard in years. No matter. He was out there, learning how to be a big-city politician, starting at the top.

Then came the morning of September 11 when New York endured the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Nearly three thousand people died, a whole swath of Lower Manhattan was destroyed, and the nations largest city faced the possibility of economic and spiritual decline. Voters began looking for someone who could put the city back together. Bloombergs campaign literature sold him as a leader, not a politician, a man who tried to fix problems, not simply complain about them.

When he won, some suggested it was not just his billions, it was a dark form of luck. But, as E. B. White so famously noted, No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky, and Bloomberg was indeed a lucky man. He had started his business at the right time and had run for mayor at the right moment. (An aide once insisted that he led such a charmed life that when he bet on a horse with the longest odds, he ended up stuffing his pocket with winnings he didnt need.) Still, Bloomberg was prepared to work extra hard, to use any turn of events to his advantage. He would not only become one of New York Citys most inventive and productive mayors, but he would also become a modern American phenomenon, using his money and his clout in an attempt to improve the lives of millions of people and to preserve the planet where they live.

By 2019, Michael Rubens Bloomberg had come a long way from his modest, working-class roots in Massachusetts. If most people have one career per lifetime, this man had already managed three. He had created a computer product that upended the old guard on Wall Street and made him one of the richest men in the world. Then he had served as mayor of New York City for twelve busy years. After that, he had taken his billions to become one of the worlds most inventive philanthropists, pledging to give away his fortune, or most of it, before he died.

As the 2020 presidential election loomed, Mike Bloomberg was clearly eyeing a fourth mission, this time to challenge a president he viewed as a con man and a threat to America. If he would not be a candidate for presidentand that had always looked tantalizing but impossiblehe would be a political sugar daddy and guru for the often disoriented and underfunded Democratic Party. He would not be idlethat, he promised.

This book is an attempt to chronicle the many lives of a man who chafes at an empty hour on his calendar. He can sit rock-hard-still and listen with a searing intensity when people come to him with proposals for his business or his politics or his philanthropy. (The Bloomberg fidget is never a good sign for anyone asking for his approval.) But mostly this perpetually ambitious man moves and adapts with incredible energy from one pursuit to another to another. He does not rest very long on his successes or brood about past failures. And when something goes haywire or simply ends (like his time at city hall), his first question is often a simple one: Whats plan B?

Bloomberg started his adult life on Wall Street. With an engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and extra glister from Harvard Business School, he first learned about the raw, greedy world of stocks, bonds, and big money at Salomon Brothers, a top brokerage in his day. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Bloomberg could fit into the raucous screw-you culture, but he was also different. Unlike many of his elders, the young Bloomberg foresaw the day when computers would eliminate the mountains of paper required to do business. He began to propose a computer system for Wall Street, and the old boys laughed at him. They demoted him to the computer floor and then fired him in 1981 with a generous payout of $10 million.

Bloomberg and three young Salomon techies quickly started a new business. Those beginnings are now the stuff of Bloomberg lore, and he will often say those were the happiest times as a bosswhen he knew everybody who worked for him and could hand out paychecks one by one. Bloombergs computer gizmo began working for bond traders before the Internet had taken hold, and as computers became the gateway and the impetus for a far more complex financial world, his business and his wealth grew astronomically. Career one would provide the funds for his other ventures over the next four decades.

Then came politics. In the late 1990s, after fifteen years as an inventive businessman, Bloomberg told friends he was ready for something new. One associate thought he wanted to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Others saw him eyeing what most people thought was impossible; he wanted to manage the biggest city in America.

In many ways, what made Bloomberg different from his billionaire class was that decision to emerge from his wealth-protected cocoon to face press and public as mayor of New York City. After twelve years and at least $650 million of his own money (nearly half of it spent on his campaigns), the Bloomberg era can now be seen as a testing ground for how a modern businessman could manage a very complicated city. It will undoubtedly attract years of study by academics and urban experts about what worked and what didnt during his busy time as mayor. He would fail in important ways, often involving the citys poor. Too many black and Hispanic youths were stopped and frisked in the name of gun control. Homeless rates soared and public housing suffered. But he improved much of the city, especially the health of its people and the effectiveness of its government. Overall, his time as mayor was a remarkable success.