The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

by Eleanor Randolph

  If that sounded a bit excessive, Bloomberg apparently liked joking about his status as deity, at least in his world of finance, politics, and philanthropy. Once, when I bumped into him at his philanthropy offices, he smiled mischievously and suggested an alternate title for this book. “What about God?” he said as aides nearby laughed nervously.15

  * * *

  Back at the company, Bloomberg had already begun emphasizing a few of his old office rules. Emails registered the time you came into the office—8:00? How could you? A stickler for all kinds of details, he grumbled about the way the paper towel racks were hidden artfully behind the mirrors in the men’s room. (He had arrows added to help direct others wandering around the rooms with dripping hands.)16

  As a passionate believer in the value of open work areas, where people can collaborate or at least know what’s happening nearby, he saw that in his twelve-year absence some executives had carved out a little private space.

  “A number of the senior people in the company had conference rooms next to their desks, and in the conference rooms there were family pictures,” he said a few years after he returned. “Literally, the next Monday when they came in, the walls were no longer on those ‘offices.’ I had the glass taken out of all of them.”17 He soon learned that some people also managed to get bigger desks, so “when they came in on Monday, every desk was the same.”18

  Shortly after he regained full control of his company, Bloomberg sent out this memo:

  To all Bloomberg people

  Hi. It’s great to be back and start to meet all 16,000 (full time) hard-working Bloomberg employees.

  One thing that helps are the badges we all wear around our necks. Unfortunately when one puts our B-unit [used to sign onto the machine] on the same lanyard as the badge, 50 percent of the time we block our names and photos. It makes the memory process for someone my age more difficult (and creates an issue for hard-working security guards). To help everyone, it makes sense to do what I do. Badge on the lanyard, B-unit in your pocket.

  Tks, Mike.19

  That sounded like a factory whistle to everybody in the company, a reminder that Bloomberg was back. For his now-massive operation of nearly twenty thousand employees (including part-time workers), that memo would be little more than window dressing. Bloomberg soon began to dig deeper, to analyze the newest details of his company. It was as if the corporation had a new executive, one colleague said. “And they always look under the carpets. They look in the cupboards. They look on the shelves.”20 Bloomberg was clearly startled by some of what he found.

  One day shortly after his return, he sat at his famous terminal with the head of engineering and product development at his elbow. As an executive listened from afar, he could just hear Bloomberg and his tutor talking about “screen shot functionality.” The reconstituted boss was trying to catch up, going through the functions on the terminal, getting updated on the convoluted markets of the day. It was no easy task, even for an expert. The animal kingdom of finance had grown far beyond bulls and bears. There were unicorns and zebras and black swans and dead cats and cockroaches. There were Bitcoins and dark pools and exchanges, swaps and new, complicated packages of all sorts. With it came the ultra-fast, high-frequency trading and all the intricacies that accompanied such speed in the marketplace.

  As the executive approached, Bloomberg suddenly challenged him. “You’ve looked at the top 500 functions on the terminal?” he asked before quickly returning to the head engineer and his own lessons on the latest tools available to Bloomberg clients. Most Bloomberg executives knew the stunning breadth of data and analytics and research available on their machine, but the newest refinements could be a mystery, especially as the questions from traders or others using the terminals became more detailed by the hour.

  Bloomberg wanted to understand why this item was here on the computer system, the logic of that function there. It had to be easily understood—no computer speak or even Wall Street jargon. As he said, repeatedly, his job was often to ask the questions that others were embarrassed to ask because they might sound dumb. It was a key part of his management system: whenever somebody came to him with a problem or an opportunity, “they’ve got to describe it to me in language I can understand. Again and again, if that’s what it takes. Describing ‘how and when’ forces them to face all those things they initially glossed over when they thought about the ‘what’ . . . They have to satisfy me, a novice.”21

  He confessed later to being surprised by how stunningly complex the financial world had become in his absence. The 320,000 Bloombergs around the globe processed 80 billion market transactions a day with terminal users sending one another 20 million instant messages.22 Later, asked how he saw his return to the company, the former mayor shook his head and said, “It has become so complicated.”23

  As the returning leader, Bloomberg had a few disruptions in store. He began reorganizing management structures that, in his view, had become too independent from the group, straying from Bloomberg LP’s basic mission to work together to feed the terminal. He soon focused on the division with the highest profile—Bloomberg News.

  * * *

  Matthew Winkler, the incendiary hired from the Wall Street Journal, had created Bloomberg’s massive financial news operation over a quarter of a century, expanding from a few dozen people in 1990 to more than 2,500 by the time Bloomberg returned.

  As the news operation spread into every medium from radio to broadcast to magazines to web fare, Winkler made Bloomberg News into a big-time player in the media field—a robust rival for the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times or network news. He would eventually win prizes for broadcast and print and digital media including the Pulitzer, the establishment’s ultimate acceptance of Bloomberg News as a force in the media world.24

  Winkler had worked hard to weather the mayor’s political years, attempting to provide a little distance when covering the government of New York City. Bloomberg News had a full-time reporter at city hall, Henry Goldman, who covered his boss, the mayor, very carefully. It was a “difficult assignment,” he admitted, but he managed by sticking to “documents, what he says, what he does and what others say. There were no real investigations of Mayor Bloomberg by Bloomberg News, and Goldman did not get exclusive access. At a holiday party during his first term, Bloomberg gave Goldman a piece of stone and explained that it was his ‘Rock and a Hard Place Award.’ ”25 By standards of most of his colleagues, Goldman hewed a straight line in his coverage of the mayor.

  The effort by Bloomberg News to cover the financial and political world without mentioning Bloomberg, the company or the man, was more tortured. When Forbes listed Michael Bloomberg in 2017 as the tenth richest man “on the planet” with $47.5 billion,26 Bloomberg’s own Bloomberg Billionaires Index failed to mention the owner in the list that was “updated at the close of every trading day in New York.” On April 4, 2017, for example, the index jumped from David Koch at $47.7 billion down to Larry Ellison at $47 billion, skipping Mike Bloomberg’s $47.5 billion altogether.

  There were other similar quirks. Bloomberg liked to boast about how he promoted and encouraged women. He insisted he wanted “gender equality” so that the company could eventually be 50 percent male and 50 percent female “at every level, in every function, in every one of our offices.”27 Three years after he left city hall, the company created the Financial Services Gender-Equality Index28 to give investors an idea of the percentage of women in a company’s workforce. The reports were voluntary, but with more than a hundred companies by 2018, one is missing from the list—Bloomberg LP. Asked about the gap, a Bloomberg aide explained that the index was to help investors decide whether to invest in public companies. Bloomberg was private.29 One Bloomberg insider suggested defensively that perhaps the number of engineers—about five thousand and mostly male—might skew the numbers as more male than female.

  * * *

  From its birth in 1990, Bloomberg News was designed to spew unadorned facts
on the terminal, and Winkler had spent nearly twenty years trying to wring opinion out of his news report. Yet in 2010, while he was still mayor, Bloomberg decided to create Bloomberg View, an opinion and editorial package for the news side. It would become a kind of combination think tank and op-ed section. George Soros had his Open Society. There were Cato and Heritage and Brookings, all places where ideas were the main commodity. Bloomberg wanted a whole section of superstars giving their opinions. The mayor, Winkler, and Doctoroff gathered a host of big names, most of them somewhere in the middle of the road politically. They would include Washington writers Al Hunt and Margaret Carlson; Peter Orszag, who had been director of the Office of Management and Budget for President Obama; Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and The Big Short; Michael Kinsley and Jonathan Alter, both famous authors and columnists; to name only a few.

  The mayor had also hired some of the best opinion editors at the Times, including the Times op-ed editor, David Shipley. Shipley started out with a coeditor, James Rubin, who had worked as an assistant secretary of state under President Clinton. Each was paid about $500,000 a year, then a stunning salary for a journalist, and the idea was that neither would be the boss. They would share the opinion side with Shipley focusing on national opinion and Rubin covering the foreign side. With two strong personalities, it was a matchup made for divorce. Ten months later, Rubin was out and Shipley was in charge.

  Andrew Rosenthal, then editor of the Times editorial page, recalled the day when then mayor Bloomberg called to talk about running his new opinion section, in particular how the page editor and the publisher run an editorial board. Rosenthal explained that occasionally your editorial staff is going to disagree with you and you are just going to have to back off and let the writers have their way. Arthur Sulzberger, then the Times publisher, had occasionally disagreed with his editorial writers but watched contrary views appear in print, Rosenthal told the mayor.

  There was a brief silence, Rosenthal recalled. Then the owner of all things Bloomberg said, “Really? Hmmm.”

  Rosenthal, who figured that Bloomberg had just rejected the whole concept of an editorial writer disagreeing with the boss, never heard from Bloomberg again.30 Started in 2011, Bloomberg’s View was very much Bloomberg’s view. He would use the platform occasionally over the years to write about climate change or trade policy or immigration or whether he planned to run for president. But, even with a talented staff and Bloomberg’s deep pockets, the View struggled to get noticed in the early years. By the Trump era, however, View was making its mark, even as the name changed to Bloomberg Opinion in 2018. Long accustomed to serving a financially sophisticated audience, including those working at the company terminals, Bloomberg’s editorial writers and columnists were well positioned to comment for a wider audience about why Trump’s policies were as shaky and disreputable as his finances.31

  * * *

  Even while Bloomberg was concentrating his energies on city hall, the Bloomberg news operation had shifted and grown and matured far from the old bulletins for the Bloomberg Terminal to more in-depth reporting around the world. And the conflict between the news side and the business side selling terminals was beginning to show. Journalists, being journalists, wanted to report the big story, the big investigation, the inside scoop. The Bloomberg sales staff wanted companies to continue renting their machines—even if flaws in those companies were being revealed by the Bloomberg news teams. It is a conflict as old as journalism when newspapers tiptoed around their advertisers or failed to do so as a matter of principle (losing ads but perhaps gaining subscribers). That conflict was even more noticeable at Bloomberg LP. As far as the top officials were concerned, the news operation was there to serve the data information business. News was unofficially designed to be another function on the machine.

  When Bloomberg returned from city hall, Winkler was still dealing with the aftermath of two major problems at his news operation. First came word that reporters were snooping on consumers using the Bloomberg Terminals—a breach of confidence that drew widespread concern among the Bloomberg users around the globe. Second, an incident in China exposed a bitter conflict between Winkler’s journalists and the sales force peddling the Bloomberg Terminal in Asia.

  One workday in early 2013, an official at Goldman Sachs got a strange call from a Bloomberg reporter who asked whether a Goldman employee was still with the firm, because she noticed that he had been “off his terminal for weeks.”

  Off his terminal? Alarm bells rang at Goldman where there were hundreds of these terminals. How was a Bloomberg news reporter able to monitor when a Goldman employee turned on the Bloomberg machine? How did the news side of Bloomberg know anything about what the business user was doing? Goldman executives “took a hard look then at the Bloomberg contract” and worried that those on the other side of the screens at Bloomberg could probably scrape data from inside their firm.32

  As the word spread to other banks and financial institutions, the New York Post and then the Times reported that Bloomberg reporters had been trained to spy on Bloomberg clients to get news. Financial news analysts (not at Bloomberg) began calling it “the Bloomberg Breach,” and there were reports on CNBC, for example, of widespread concern about how far the snooping had gone.33 A spokesman for the Bank of England called the intrusion “reprehensible.”34 For users of those expensive terminals, it was a reminder that the central Bloomberg brain—that colony of expert researchers and analysts—had to know what clients were asking in order to provide the answers. Did they pass those questions and answers on to the news side?

  One Bloomberg contract, revealed by the digital business news website Quartz, stipulated that Bloomberg could monitor customer usage “solely for operational reasons.” That had the sound of engineers or customer support workers. But somewhere in the same network were the people who reported for Bloomberg News. That wall between news and business apparently had a few holes in it. There had been hints two years earlier when a Bloomberg TV anchor reported that the news operation had used “one of the unique tools that we have at our disposal, to find out a little bit about” a trader who lost millions of dollars for UBS.35 But the Goldman incident shook the belief for many clients that the business they were conducting on the Bloomberg system was safe and private.

  Winkler moved quickly to apologize and announce that reporters no longer had access to even basic activity by clients, including log-on information. “Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable,” he said in an editorial in Bloomberg View.36 Winkler also insisted that reporters could only see log-on information and how many times a client used “aggregated” functions akin to seeing how many times a client used Excel or Word. “At no time did reporters have access to trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter” or other parts of the Bloomberg system, he wrote. And he added that they could not see messages and stories or securities that clients were examining on the terminal. Finally, Winkler also promised that no Bloomberg reporter would be allowed to poke around in a client’s terminal ever again.

  CEO Dan Doctoroff apologized personally to dozens of clients. He labeled it a “mistake,” and when users signed onto their terminals, an apology and statement about privacy for clients was the first thing they saw. Doctoroff, who had taken over the company in 2008, tried to organize Bloomberg’s freewheeling management system, often described as throwing cats in a bag to see who claws a way out. He had argued for a few new concepts to help various divisions like news make more money. He had been known to remind editors that the terminal paid their mortgages. He often called the machine “the sun” or sometimes “the giver of life,” and on his desk, he had a model of the known planets circling a sun with the image of the terminal attached to it.37 A loss of confidence by Bloomberg’s customers was the last thing he needed.

  * * *

  The Chinese episode, which came to a head a few months later, jeopardized both Winkler’s hard-fought reputatio
n in journalism and the Bloomberg company’s access to a growing market. Across the globe, China’s economy was booming, a lucrative market for Western businesses including Bloomberg LP. By late 2013, there were more than two thousand Bloomberg Terminals in China38 with plenty of room to grow. The Bloomberg operations in Beijing and Hong Kong were also busy feeding Chinese data and news into the more than 320,000 terminals around the world. It was good for business, but Bloomberg company officials always worried about whether Bloomberg News coverage of China would offend Chinese officials. To keep the Chinese data coming, some of Bloomberg’s managers found a way in 2011 to block items that might cause the Chinese to hamper the Bloomberg business. It was called Code 204. When Code 204 was attached to a story, it automatically stopped at the borders of Mainland China.39

  At the same time, Winkler was creating a strong investigative unit, and the Hong Kong news bureau included editor-at-large Ben Richardson and Michael Forsythe, the chief investigative reporter, plus three other investigators. Amanda Bennett, who won a Pulitzer for work at the Wall Street Journal and had been the first woman editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, ran the investigative team, which made international news in 2012 for a series called China’s Red Nobility. The stunning report gave details about the family finances of Xi Jinping, who would soon become president of China. The family, with its holdings in minerals, real estate, and mobile phone equipment, had assets of $376 million. It was a gutsy report, so widely admired in the journalism community that it won a Polk Award40 and came close to winning the Pulitzer, which went instead to the Times for its piece on the Chinese “princelings” making money because of their connections to outgoing premier Wen Jiabao.41