55 Things About Mike Bloomberg You Won't Read on The Paper

             

Mike Bloomberg’s sudden climb up the polls has been fueled by an unprecedented gusher of cash, a self-funded, blank-check campaign buildup and blanket advertising designed to introduce the $64-billion man to a national electorate that mostly didn’t follow his 12-year tenure as mayor of New York or his groundbreaking career as the founder of his eponymous financial services, data and media conglomerate.

Bloomberg arrives on the debate stage Wednesday night without the year or more of coverage that has been focused on his top rivals—to say nothing of the eight debates he missed. What do voters need to know? Here, culled from biographies, his memoir and coverage over the years in major news outlets, is a quick primer on the life of Michael Rubens Bloomberg, born on Valentine’s Day in 1942 in Boston, one of the richest people in the world and the most recent entrant in this topsy-turvy 2020 presidential cycle. Wednesday night‘s debate in Nevada is the first for which he’s qualified, the result of a change in the rules that eliminated the donor threshold. 

There are, after all, lots of things you’ll never learn from a campaign ad.

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1. His father was a bookkeeper at a dairy and never earned more than $6,000 a year.

2. His mother persuaded the family’s Irish attorney to buy a house in suburban Medford, Massachusetts, and quickly resell it to the Bloombergs because real estate agents wouldn’t sell to Jews.

3. One of Bloomberg’s favorite television shows as a boy was John Cameron Swayze’s “Camel News Caravan.” He wrote a letter to Swayze explaining that the one-humped mascot on the cigarette package was not, in fact, a camel but specifically a dromedary.

4. An Eagle Scout, he escorted elderly residents to polls—including, twice, the mother of aviator Amelia Earhart.

5. His favorite book as a teenager was Johnny Tremain, the novel by Esther Forbes about the poor boy who becomes a spy for Paul Revere. He read it, he has said, “at least 50 times.”

6. At Medford High School, he was president of the slide rule club and a member of the debating society. In the yearbook, which described each senior with one word, Bloomberg was called “argumentative.” He wrote a paper as a senior contending that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew in advance about Japan’s plans to attack Pearl Harbor and let it happen because he thought World War II was going to happen anyway and it would lead the United States into the conflict and out of the Depression.

7. At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he was an engineering major, a mostly C student, the first Jewish member of Phi Kappa Psi, president of his fraternity and president of his class. He talked to his friends about wanting to be the president of the United States.

8. When he got into Harvard Business School, his mother said, “Don’t let it go to your head.”

9. Flat feet kept him out of Vietnam.

10. His first job after grad school, starting in June 1966, was at Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, where he counted securities by hand and made $9,000 a year.

11. His first three months at Salomon coincided with a heatwave in New York City, during which he was assigned to work “in an unairconditioned bank vault” counting securities by hand. He and his co-workers stripped to their underwear and shared “an occasional six-pack of beer.”

12. He prided himself on getting into the office by 7 a.m, earlier than anyone else except managing partner Billy Salomon (son of the company’s founder), which endeared him to Salomon.

13. He smoked until he was in his early 30s. He quit by imagining his worst enemy outliving him. Who that was, or is, he has never said.

14. In August 1972, he was passed over for a partnership in Salomon, which he found out when his name was noticeably absent from a very public list of new partners. “I had been passed over and, with such a big group accepted, humiliated as well,” he wrote in his memoir. “It was so bad, there wasn't even anyone left with whom I could commiserate. I was devastated.”

15. Three months later, he was named a partner.

16. In January 1976, he piloted a helicopter that was on fire, touching down on a tiny island off Connecticut. “All pilots learn to make a commitment and stick to it, follow the book, and depend on others to do the same,” he would explain. “Those who don’t, don’t survive.”

17. He got married, later that year, at 34, to the daughter of a retired Royal Air Force wing commander. Together, they had two daughters.

18. In 1979, Bloomberg was demoted (allegedly because of criticisms he aimed at colleagues) and was shifted off the trading floor to oversee information systems. He used the next two years to learn more about early computers and come up with essentially an embryonic Bloomberg Terminal.

19. He was fired in 1981 after Salomon was purchased. Bloomberg, as a partner, voted to accept the acquisition bid after realizing he would receive a payout of $10 million in cash. He used the money to start his own company.

20. In 1986, he changed the name of his company from Innovative Market Systems to Bloomberg LP, part of a conscious effort to make himself central to the brand’s image.

21. Here are some things he’s said according to a gag gift some staff gave him for his birthday in 1990: “Make the customer think he’s getting laid when he’s getting fucked.” “The three biggest lies are: The check’s in the mail, I’ll respect you in the morning, and I’m glad that I’m Jewish.” “If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s.” “Whenever my wife catches me eyeing some broad, she’s very careful to turn to me and say, ‘That’s the most expensive piece of ass in the world.’”

22. He got divorced in 1993.

23. He has never remarried.

24. In 1997, for his memoir, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, he tried but failed to get a promotional blurb from the pope.

25. In 2000, in London, he hosted 1,500 employees at a “Seven Deadly Sins” gala at a converted warehouse where areas were labeled lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. For gluttony, there were sweets, sushi, and truffles; for lust, there were drag queens, massage rooms and a massive silk-covered bed; for greed, there were entertainers waving bills and shouting, “Money, ain’t it gorgeous?”

26. For decades, he scheduled his own appointments for the same $35 haircut.

27. He switched his registration from Democratic to Republican in the run-up to running for mayor of New York in 2001.

28. In his speech announcing his initial mayoral candidacy, he used “I” 117 times.

29. He once complimented Donald Trump for crediting the role others played in his business success. “The selfish loner who phrases everything as 'I' or 'me' will never go the limit. Not one of the businessmen and businesswomen at the top really deep down inside thinks that he or she did it alone,” he wrote in his memoir. “The press may write about Dede in art auctions, The Donald in real estate, Martha and homemaking, Bill and software … [but] the more successful you are, the more likely it is that ‘you’ is a group.”

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30. Early in his first campaign, a potential voter asked Bloomberg about the Second Amendment. “And that one is?” he said.

31. After pledging he wouldn’t spend more than $30 million on his first campaign—“at some point, you start to look obscene,” he said—he eventually spent $73,391,461 of his own money.

32. He took an annual salary as mayor of $1. After Social Security deductions, he once said, his paychecks came to 93 cents. He framed them uncashed.

33. He hired his daughter to be a program coordinator at City Hall. He hired his sister to be the commissioner of the city’s Commission for the United Nations, Consular Corps, and Protocol. He paid them each also $1 a year.

34. In July 2003, after James Davis, a New York councilman, and former NYPD officer, was shot and killed at City Hall, Bloomberg began to push for gun control measures. “I don't know why people carry guns,” he said shortly after the shooting. “Guns kill people.”

35. On his second mayoral campaign, he spent $85 million of his own money. He ran targeted ads in Spanish and Russian and Mandarin and Urdu. He won by nearly 20 points, the biggest victory margin ever for a Republican mayor of New York.

36. In his inaugural address after being sworn into his second term, he cited “ending the threat of guns and the violence they do” as his “most urgent challenge” as mayor. Since then, he has personally donated more than $270 million to organizations supporting the gun control movement.

37. He was halfway through his second term when his constituents learned that he had had two stents put into a coronary artery the year before his first campaign.

38. In 2006, he fired a city employee for playing Solitaire on his office computer.

39. In 2007, toying with the idea of running for president, the Democrat-turned-Republican changed his party affiliation again—this time to independence.

40. In early 2008, he said this about Barack Obama, John McCain, and the other presidential candidates: “But what the hell do they know about management and dealing with people? Nothing. If you look at my company, why, after all the success that we had before I ran for office, would you not think that I couldn’t run a government?” 

41. He lobbied the New York City Council, successfully, to change the rules so he could run for a third term. Critics called it “worthy of ‘democracy’ in a banana republic,” “an attempt to suspend democracy” and “a coup.” Not everybody thought so. New York’s three major newspapers, the Times, the Post and the Daily News, endorsed the bid. And Donald Trump, then known mostly as the star of “The Apprentice,” said a limit of two terms as “a terrible idea” and “an artificial barrier.”

42. On his third mayoral campaign, he spent $108,371,685.01.

43. He was, as mayor, an aggressive advocate of public health, banning smoking in restaurants and bars in the city and trying to get citizens to eat less salt and fat. Critics tagged him “Nanny Bloomberg.” He tried, too, to ban sugary sodas served in containers larger than 16 ounces, but the state’s highest court nixed it.

44. During his time as mayor, police use of “stop-and-frisk” spiked in the city from 97,296 instances in 2002 to 685,724 in 2011. Around the apex of the practice, black and brown people were nine times as likely as white people to be targeted. He defended it, defiantly at times, until last fall, when he apologized.

45. He was worth about $4 billion when he took office. He was worth more like $33 billion when he left.

46. In 2014, his lawyers registered some 400 web addresses when a new city domain became available, an effort to make sure they weren’t scooped up by people up to no good. The addresses included MikeIsTooShort.NYC, MikeBloombergisaDweeb.NYC, Bloombergthespoiler.nyc and FuckBloomberg.nyc.

47. In 2018, he was America’s second-most generous billionaire, behind only Jeff Bezos. He has, says his staff, given away almost $10 billion.

48. He has written that “people need to understand that life, like it or not, has to be quid pro quo.”

49. He owns 12 homes, including properties in New York, London, Bermuda, and Florida.

50. He refuses to attend going-away parties for departing Bloomberg employees. “They've become bad people. Period,” he once said. “We have a loyalty to us. Leave, and you're them.”

51. He doesn’t like movies.

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52. He thinks baseball is boring.

53. An exception to his general aversion to sports: He started golfing shortly before he became mayor. He could shoot in the 120s early on before working to drop his handicap down to a respectable 15 or 13.

54. He has said he loves Sunday nights because he gets to go to work the next day.

55. His father died at 57. His mother died at 102. He has said he plans to live to 125.

Sources: Bloomberg by Bloomberg, by Mike Bloomberg; Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics, by Joyce Purnick; Bloomberg: A Billionaire’s Ambition, by Chris McNickle; The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg, by Eleanor Randolph; New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Washington Post, and Forbes.