page_title: Michael Bloomberg
section_title: Business career
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Bloomberg / Business career
caption_attribution_description: English: Bloomberg six-screen setup @ Bloomberg West, San Francisco 2012 Bloomberg Terminal photo by jm3. Creative Commons licensed, Attribution, ShareAlike For use on Bloomberg Terminal article.
context_page_description: Michael Rubens Bloomberg KBE is an American businessman, politician, philanthropist, and author. He is the majority owner and co-founder of Bloomberg L.P.. He was the mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, and was briefly a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
  Bloomberg grew up in Medford, Massachusetts and graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Business School. He began his career at the securities brokerage Salomon Brothers before forming his own company in 1981. That company, Bloomberg L.P., is a financial information, software and media firm that is known for its Bloomberg Terminal. Bloomberg spent the next twenty years as its chairman and CEO. In 2020, Forbes ranked him as the sixteenth-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $48 billion as of 7 April 2020 and as of 21 July 2020, Bloomberg ranked 8th in Forbes 400 with net worth $60.1 billion. Since signing The Giving Pledge, Bloomberg has given away $8.2 billion.
  Bloomberg was elected the 108th mayor of New York City. First elected in 2001, he held office for three consecutive terms, winning re-election in 2005 and in 2009.
context_section_description: In 1973, Bloomberg became a general partner at Salomon Brothers, a large Wall Street investment bank, where he headed equity trading and, later, systems development. In 1981, Salomon Brothers was bought by Phibro Corporation, and Bloomberg was laid off from the investment bank with a $10 million cash buyout of his partnership stake in the firm.
  Using this money, Bloomberg, having designed in-house computerized financial systems for Salomon, set up a data services company named Innovative Market Systems (IMS) based on his belief that Wall Street would pay a premium for high-quality business information, delivered instantaneously on computer terminals in a variety of usable formats. The company sold customized computer terminals that delivered real-time market data, financial calculations and other analytics to Wall Street firms. The terminal, first called the Market Master terminal, was released to market in December 1982.
  In 1986, the company renamed itself Bloomberg L.P. Over the years, ancillary products including Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg Message, and Bloomberg Tradebook were launched. Bloomberg, L.P. had revenues of approximately $10 billion in 2018. As of 2019, the company has more than 325,000 terminal subscribers worldwide and employs 20,000 people in dozens of locations.
  The culture of the company in the 1980s and 1990s has been compared to a fraternity, with employees bragging in the company's office about their sexual exploits. The company was sued four times by female employees for sexual harassment, including one incident in which a victim claimed to have been raped. To celebrate Bloomberg's 48th birthday, colleagues published a pamphlet entitled Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg. Among various sayings that were attributed to him, several have subsequently been criticized as sexist or misogynistic.
  When he left the position of CEO to pursue a political career as the mayor of New York City, Bloomberg was replaced by Lex Fenwick and later by Daniel L. Doctoroff, after his initial service as deputy mayor under Bloomberg. After completing his final term as the mayor of New York City, Bloomberg spent his first eight months out of office as a full-time philanthropist. In fall 2014, he announced that he would return to Bloomberg L.P. as CEO at the end of 2014, succeeding Doctoroff, who had led the company since February 2008. Bloomberg resigned as CEO of Bloomberg L.P. to run for president in 2019.
caption: A 2012 Bloomberg Terminal with a multi-monitor set-up composed of six screens
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