Winkler’s colleagues at the Journal were flummoxed that he would suddenly dive into such a murky, risky venture. But as many others learned over the years, Mike Bloomberg was like a magus who hypnotized his prey into working long hours on his crusade to change Wall Street and, of course, to help themselves and Bloomberg get very, very rich.
On his first day, February 5, 1990, Winkler arrived at 8:00 a.m., a version of daybreak for journalists, but as he settled in, his new boss walked by. “Hello, Winkler. Nice of you to show up,” Bloomberg said as he handed his newest employee a piece of paper. “An outline,” Winkler remembered. “It was neat, typical Mike, but it filled the page on both sides. Number one, then a,b,c,d. Two, a,b,c,d. It was like a scientific experiment,” he said, one laid out carefully by a man who organized his thoughts and linked the stages of a new project like an engineer. The mission was as simple as it would be difficult: create something that gave a Bloomberg user financial news so that they didn’t need to go elsewhere, certainly not to Reuters or Dow Jones or the radio or even the New York Times. Bloomberg handed Winkler the daunting and exhilarating task of creating an entire financial news empire. From scratch.6
The official birth date for the Bloomberg news operation (then called Bloomberg Business News, or BBN) was June 14, 1990. It was not a painless delivery. As almost anyone who worked for Matt Winkler would explain, it was like a club, and you had to be initiated, you had to be “Winklerized,” as they called it. At the smallest provocation, Winkler would yell and grow red in the face, a color that would often contrast with a sedate plaid bow tie that did little to soften his appearance. Bloomberg would yell back, on occasion, but mostly Winkler’s bottomless font of anger would land on his besieged workers. If they could stand it, survive it, really, they learned to value the advice from the man who would push and cajole and bellow and give birth to Bloomberg News.
At first, Winkler had his writers rewriting the dailies. His team would beat even Bloomberg to the office by arriving at their desks before 3:00 a.m., when they read and digested the financial news as soon as they could find it—in the Journal, the Times, the FT in London, the Nikkei Asian Review, anything else that they could harvest. Then they summarized each important story—fifty to sixty summaries a day, most of them available on the Bloomberg Terminals by 7:30 a.m. These press summaries gave credit, of course, the copyright lawyers saw to that, but as Winkler put it proudly, “When you saw the headline, you thought, oh, Bloomberg News is covering all these things.” Winkler soon added the public relations announcements—company A buys company B—a headline with the press release attached. That moved hundreds of other items onto the Bloomberg wire.
* * *
Winkler and Bloomberg called this early period their Wizard of Oz era, when Bloomberg machine users were simply too busy to look behind the box. (Except, of course, for the people at Dow Jones.) About two months into the Oz era, Dow Jones announced that their company would no longer do business with Bloomberg because it was a competitor. But Winkler said the Dow Jones crowd soon learned they had a contract to provide their news to Bloomberg and their reports would stay on the terminals for another ten months. After ten months, he noted that DJ kept quietly renewing their contract as the terminals grew more popular on Wall Street. At the same time, the news offering to the Bloomberg Terminals was growing. “It was beginning to actually look like the fire hose, which Mike delighted in. He loved the idea that people could drink from a fire hose, of all things, from him,” Winkler said.7
In Washington, D.C., however, there was one barrier that could bring that fire hose down to a disturbing trickle: the powerful committee of journalists who gave out press passes to government agencies. The House/Senate Standing Committee of Correspondents was created in 1879 to separate the press from the lobbyists. Over the years, as newspapers changed into all sorts of news delivery systems, this group maintained a choke hold on who could get into the press pens.
The committee, made up of people who knew Winkler from the Journal, refused to give his Bloomberg News reporters credentials to cover the Commerce Department, the Labor Department, all the Washington agencies and departments that affect the financial world. The press passes were the golden tickets of journalism, and without them, Bloomberg News could not cover the breaking economic news that terminal users found so necessary.
“What are you?” the chairman of the committee of correspondents asked, according to Winkler. “Where are you published?” When Winkler fumed that they were published on the Bloomberg Terminal, that they were an “electronic newspaper,” he was told that there were no “criteria” for that kind of electronic news.8
So Bloomberg and Winkler knew they had to get published. Somewhere. Their solution soon came from Floyd Norris, a respected financial columnist at the New York Times. The Times writers like Norris wanted a Bloomberg machine, so Bloomberg agreed to give the paper a free terminal if the Times would give Bloomberg credit when they published any of Bloomberg’s news items. Norris got the editor to agree and once Bloomberg pieces were published in the Times, it was like being sanctioned by the news Vatican. The press passes arrived quickly, and as other news organizations asked for the terminals, Bloomberg said, “That’s great, put ’em in.”
Soon, Bloomberg had his machines tucked into the wire rooms of more than four hundred news organizations9 across the country, and Winkler’s staff was growing. (After five years of free terminal use, Bloomberg began to charge. Most news organizations like the Times paid to keep a machine.) Norris said that when Fortune magazine later offered him a job, one of his first questions was whether they had a Bloomberg. “I was so addicted to Bloomberg,” he said, because as a columnist on deadline, he often needed background information instantly on a company or a financial trend. With the Bloomberg, he said, “in a few seconds, I could learn an incredible amount” about the day’s subject.10
From a few dozen workers in the beginning, the Bloomberg News operation doubled in size, then doubled again. When the Times and the Washington Post started firing people during a downtime, the whisper as they went out the door was always “Bloomberg’s hiring.” It wasn’t normal journalism for most reporters, but it was a fat and comfortable paycheck.
As the news operation expanded, Bloomberg increasingly left Winkler alone. He had promised to protect his news operation from corporate types who didn’t like his coverage, and when his fellow CEOs called to whine, Bloomberg usually simply transferred the complaint back to Winkler. Bloomberg also did very little to interfere with Winkler’s rules and his chain-gang management style.
Winkler enforced what he soon began to call “The Bloomberg Way” for his growing army of journalists. He quickly put out a spiral notebook with his rules of journalism—a 376-page tome handed out to every journalist on day one.11 Leaked versions of what was really Winkler’s Way made him most famous for outlawing the word “but,” which he argued might confuse traders who didn’t have time for nuance and conflicting ideas. When the book went public in 2011, it became clearer that Winkler’s advice to his journalists was far broader than a few basic rules. He gave detailed instructions on how to make the news “lucid enough, even to Aunt Agatha.”12 His demand for the Five F’s meant every story was supposed to be First, Factual, Fastest (isn’t that like “First”?), Final, and keyed to the Future. Adverbs and adjectives were considered too “imprecise.” Labels like “moderate” or “activist” were verboten. Although much of The Bloomberg Way is a description of good journalism, it reads today like a daunting rule book for a reporter who knew that the man in the bow tie was breathing fire over his shoulder.
There was also forbidden territory. Bloomberg News would not write about Bloomberg, the company or the man. That rule would become more troublesome as Michael Bloomberg became a top news maker, a big name in politics, finance, and philanthropy.
6
LIFE IN THE BLOOMBERG FISHBOWL
“You either caught on or you left us.”
—Thomas Secunda1
&nbs
p; As Bloomberg steadily expanded his private company—225 employees by 1988 to more than 7,000 by 2001,2 and as he prepared to step aside to run for mayor—he still relied on Salomon’s floor model. He insisted on the open plan, a bull pen with a cluster of desks where nobody was out of sight or beyond a shout from the boss. His open floor would never be as noisy as Salomon’s, but even as Bloomberg LP expanded to offices around the globe, the culture was there, the back-alley rowdiness so beloved on Wall Street, the sense of mission that made it all seem okay. There would be protests from women about being encouraged to wear short skirts and then being asked to get things from that file drawer near the floor.3 For years, it was a tolerated misbehavior that Bloomberg and his lawyers would strenuously deny, especially when complaints reached the courts.
The Bloomberg Way could feel very strange to somebody who had worked for, say, the more conventional Chase or Goldman Sachs. “It’s almost like a patrician family structure,” said one ex-employee.4 Once, during a Bloomberg television interview with Bloomberg and hedge fund mastermind Ray Dalio, then moderator Stephanie Ruhle noted that some people had described both of their massive corporations as cults. Dalio, who had dismissed such charges before, denied any exotic culture in his company. Bloomberg folded his arms, crossed his legs defensively, and rejected the very idea at Bloomberg LP.5 “It’s very regimented, and it feels kinda like a boot camp. You basically have a drill sergeant—a command goes out, and everyone acts on that command,” said another ex-employee. That top commander, of course, was Bloomberg, whose word traveled almost as fast as his data. He liked to be in control of everything, even as the business grew far beyond his natural reach.
“Moving from ‘hands-on’ to ‘hands-off’ has been a gradual, and not that pleasant, process for me,” Bloomberg admitted as the company grew in the 1990s. “I’m an operating guy as opposed to a strategic person. I like doing things myself, getting my hands dirty,” he added. “If we’re to grow and not be dependent on yours truly, turn it over I must. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it.”6
Employees’ office emails showed the time they arrived at work or when they returned after a rare lunch outside the building. Meetings were sometimes held without chairs, with everyone standing—they didn’t last as long that way. And if the intense twelve-hour days were too much—even with the comfortable perks and paychecks—there were the elaborate staff parties. In New York City in recent years, Bloomberg has rented a large patch of parkland on Randall’s Island to create an elaborate carnival—with a carousel, rides, games, concerts, and food for thousands. In 2011, Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates estimated the Bloomberg party cost about $9 million, including at least a $750,000 yearly donation beginning in 2009 to the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation.7 Croft and others objected to the exclusive use of a public park by a private corporation, especially one then affiliated with the mayor, but for young Bloomberg employees and their families it was much needed downtime.
By far the most famous of these relief parties was the Seven Deadly Sins gala in London in 2000. A large warehouse was converted into a pleasure palace for about 1,500 employees. Each section depicted a “sin”: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, or pride. For a mere million pounds, give or take a few thousand, there were rooms for sushi, sweets, and truffles for the Gluttony section; manicure and massage rooms, live bands, drag queens, and a massive silk-covered bed for the Lust pavilion. Greed was there, of course, with entertainers waving bills and shouting, “Money, ain’t it gorgeous?”8 A party lover and party giver, he made news in Los Angeles when his celebration for Democrats at their 2000 convention was a little more subdued, featuring a bed of oysters topped with a woman in a tasteful mermaid suit.9
* * *
Bloomberg set the tone, especially in the early years. It was a boisterous place. Work hard. Laugh hard. Be tough or be gone. Bloomberg wanted to welcome every new employee. Some early Bloomberg workers remember their first day, suddenly looking up from the desk to see their new boss. In one moment that became famous for a while, a bright but taciturn hire suddenly found Bloomberg at his side. The terror in the young man’s eyes was obvious to those around him, and Bloomberg, who could converse with a stone, found this youth particularly difficult. Finally, he asked where the young man went to school.
“Brown,” the youth choked.
“Ah, Brown,” Bloomberg chuckled. “That’s where I got my first blow job.”
The employee froze, desperately searching for a response.
Finally, he said, “In Providence?”
Other employees erupted in laughter, and for a while, when anyone made an off-color remark the response was a question: “In Providence?”10
Bloomberg, who became well known for his closed computer system, also became famous for the Bloomberg biosphere. The open-plan office was meant to be self-sustaining. The snacks and coffee or tea became more elaborate over the years, and a light lunch was free at a central location where people did not exactly meet—there never seemed to be time for that. Free lunch, however, could be a little intimidating for anybody who wanted to have lunch at, say, the sushi bar down the street. Bloomberg once said, “If people believe it’s really free, you don’t understand the business model.”11
The money was good, even in tough years, and the race to sell terminals or help a struggling trader or break a bit of news was often exhilarating. This was a high-speed workplace, where success was increasingly timed in seconds, and if it ultimately exhausted some workers, others relished the pace, the competition, and the raucous camaraderie. Bloomberg, who often said he loved Sunday nights because he could go to work the next day, continued to arrive shortly after daybreak, as a rule. He would have difficulty understanding people who failed to enjoy hard work as much as he did. He complained about consultants, outsiders, who stopped work at 5:00 p.m. while employees work “till 7:00, 8:00 or 9:00 at night, until the project is done.”12 And unions? Not at his private company. As Secunda would put it, as nicely as possible, “You either caught on or you left us.”
Those who left quietly spread the word that if Bloomberg was an exhilarating ride, you had to be ready to cede life for work. Some workers called themselves Stakhanovites, after the Ukrainian miner who became a Soviet hero for supposedly digging out an impossible 227 tons of coal in a single shift. One former news employee, Hal Davis, saw younger employees already wearing wrist bandages because of repetitive stress syndrome. “They’re grinding people into the ground,” he said.
It was very steady employment, especially in an age when so many jobs seemed temporary. Few people were fired, but a resignation in Bloomberg’s world was the company’s form of treason. Going-away parties were taboo, and once you left, you were a nonperson. The company was not supposed to hire you back. Ever. Well, maybe, if you left to take care of a sick relative or to get a graduate degree, but even then, it was hard to do. He once explained, “God forbid one of our people [should] go to work for a competitor, then we all heartily and cordially really do hope they fail. In their new job, they have an avowed purpose to hurt their old coworkers. They have become bad people. Period. We have a loyalty to us. Leave and you’re them.”13
Bloomberg explained that although he didn’t allow anyone to hire family members at the company, “I’m a big believer that organizations are family, and you can’t be perfect and sometimes you make mistakes, but we have to make sure that people understand if they devote themselves to the good of—either it is the city government where I worked or this company, or the foundation or whatever—it is a two-way street. We have to take care of them.”14
Certainly, one reason some people stayed was the generous annual bonus. Based loosely on the Salomon Brothers system,15 Bloomberg gave each employee a share of the company’s profits for what he called Equity Equivalent Certificates, or EECs. These gifts, called simply “certs,” could usually be cashed out a year after they were granted—but you had to be working at Bloomberg to get the check. One detail: when y
our cert was announced, it was based on the company’s performance that year. The actual value might be slightly different.
Bloomberg kept most of his employees, who loved the feverish competition as well as the dependable paycheck, the good health care, the camaraderie, and the chance to move up the corporate chain. Some were not so content, however, and Bloomberg and his company have faced a number of lawsuits, most notably in the 1990s, including those from women who felt they were being belittled in the company’s raunchy climate or were demoted when they became pregnant. These women portrayed a work environment that was a throwback to the 1950s, and by the twenty-first century, that hard humor of the Wall Street boys’ club wasn’t so funny anymore.
Mike Bloomberg would consistently deny that women were being treated differently, and he would feverishly deny the specific charges that these employees made in court.
Perhaps the most famous suit was filed by a sales employee named Sekiko Sakai Garrison. She charged that when she met Bloomberg in the corporate snack bar in 1995 and told him she was pregnant, he sneered, “Kill it.” She added that Bloomberg began grumbling about how many women at Bloomberg LP were pregnant and thus not able to work as hard as everyone else.
Garrison said Bloomberg left a private voicemail message on her machine at work. “I didn’t say it,” he said in her version of the conversation. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t say it.”16 He tried to get her to come back to work, she said, and when she turned to lawyers instead, Bloomberg’s muscular legal machine went to work.
Garrison’s suit stated that Bloomberg and his executives subjected females to repeated sexual comments and unwelcome sexual overtures. Women were encouraged to wear short skirts, high heels, and tight blouses, Garrison charged. She sued, seeking more than $15 million17 in damages for five counts of harassment and discrimination.18
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 8
