Michael Bloomberg: Market master

24:25But the media empire doesn't really contribute very much of the money. The money, most of the money comes from those special little boxes on people's desks, the Bloomberg Terminal. That's where all the money still comes from. Mike Bloomberg from Medford, Boston, officially a billionaire.

24:45So we've talked a lot about the business and how that's grown. Let's rewind a bit and look at Michael Bloomberg, the man. It seems like, you know, Bloomberg, the man himself, really likes to be, you know, in the mix of things. You know, he says, I travelled with a big expense account. I had a girlfriend in every city and I set new records and burning the candle at both ends. You know, he comes off as this like classic New Yorker. Yeah, he sure does. But he calms down a bit. Well, maybe he doesn't. 1976, he marries Susan, a British Solomon Brothers secretary. They have two girls together. But by 1993, they've divorced.

25:20And, you know, his daughter said they weren't compatible. My mum doesn't want to be social all of the time. But, you know, to his credit, they remain good friends. In an interview in 1996 with The Guardian, he said, I like theatre, dining and chasing women. Let me put it this way. I'm a single straight billionaire in Manhattan. What do you think? It's a wet dream. What a drama. But there we go. So by this time, we're getting a sort of picture of him. He's known for his brash, offensive language from the trading floor days. He never loses that. So there's also a controversial and disputed by Bloomberg's own team bit of insider information about Michael Bloomberg.

25:59So for his 48th birthday, he was given a booklet of quotes. So someone went around the Bloomberg, the company, asking people for quotes that they remember Bloomberg saying. And it's called Portable Bloomberg, the wit and wisdom of Michael Bloomberg. And the introduction says, yes, these are all actual quotes. Nothing has been embellished or exaggerated. this will come to bite him later on in his life. Some examples. Make the customer think he's getting laid when he's getting effed. Don't get even, get revenge. About his own terminal. It will do everything, including giving you a blowjob. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business.

26:36Oh, that's bad. That is terrible. And another one, which is not about the Bloomberg terminal, but tells you a lot about how he views women or viewed women. I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site and doesn't get a whistle will turn around and walk past again and again until she gets one. But when he was running for political office, these quotes clearly obviously came back to haunt him. And a political office spokesperson said, Mike simply did not say the things somebody wrote in this gag gift. Well, whether he said those things or not, the fact remains that Bloomberg the company faced nearly 40 cases involving 65 complainants between 1996 and 2016.

27:16and a lot of those were on the basis of gender, race, disability, pregnancy, for example. This was reviewed in an investigation by Business Insider. Some of the cases include in 1996, a woman sued Bloomberg, the company alleging she was drugged and raped by a supervisor. She said male superiors passed around blow-up sex dolls and asked her if she wore thongs. And she said Michael Bloomberg set the tone and engaged in a pattern and practice of sexual degradation of women. Including regularly making sexual comments about female employees like, I'd like to do that piece of meat. And in deposition when asked what he would regard as proof of the sexual assault, he said, I guess, an unimpeachable third party witness.

27:59So what he's saying there is that he'll only believe that this sexual assault took place if somebody else watched it and was an unimpeachable witness. That's quite a thing to say. It's just so out there. I mean, by Michael Bloomberg's own definition, the vast majority of rape and sexual assault could never be proved in court because there'll be nobody to witness it. Now, it's important to say that this case was dismissed because the woman's lawyer failed to meet a filing deadline. But the company spokeswoman insisted that Bloomberg as a company had zero tolerance for harassment or rape. But then there are other cases.

28:34So Kiko Garrison, for example, alleged Michael Bloomberg told her to kill it when she revealed she was pregnant. A Bloomberg spokesman said that he did not make any of the statements alleged in the Sikiko Garrison case. There was a confidential financial settlement agreed with Sikiko Garrison and some people said it was in six figures. But it wasn't just the 90s. There were at least eight discrimination suits against Bloomberg LP between 2014 to 2020. I think it's going to be hard to ignore this pattern of lawsuits and what have you when we come to judge Mike Bloomberg at the end on some of our different categories.

29:10Villainy, for example. Oh, definitely. And, you know, these kinds of comments and the past behaviour at the company, you know, this is going to come back to bite him in the arse when he decides to turn his attention to politics.

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30:12Which function or scenario or the use case do I start with that gives me the most value? I'm Chip Kranixl, host of Resilient Edge, a business vitality podcast paid and presented by Deloitte. Our latest episode has the answers to all these questions and more. Available now wherever you listen to podcasts.

30:36It's 2003 in Birmingham. Doors have been slammed in your face. You're not welcome here. They were capable of murder and had murder. Drive-by killings, gang wars, a vigilante group that fought against Jamaica's notorious Yardies. The homeboys thought, we're not going to take this anymore. We're going to be even more violent than you. Before turning on each other. I'm Livy Haydock and this is Gangster, the story of the Burger Bar Boys. Listen on BBC Sounds.

31:09At the turn of the millennium, Bloomberg decides to turn his attentions to politics. So he steps down as CEO of Bloomberg to enter the mayoral race for New York. So in 2001, he ran for mayor of New York City to replace Rudy Giuliani. The weird thing is, he was a lifelong member of the Democratic Party, but he ran on a Republican ticket. Yeah, this is odd. And I think the reason why he did this is because he saw that at the time, Giuliani, you know, not the Giuliani that we see now, but Giuliani then was a pretty popular, successful mayor. And he wanted to get that endorsement. And by running as a Republican, he got that endorsement.

31:46Yeah, Giuliani was credited with sort of cleaning up New York, crime levels went down. So Giuliani was someone whose blessing would have been a very powerful thing. And so maybe in order to get in the slipstream of Giuliani, he decided to run as a Republican. And this election also happened to be during a catastrophic, cataclysmic time for New York, because voting in the primary began on September 11, as in 9-11. Yeah, and it was postponed, obviously, due to those terrorist attacks. Now, Michael Bloomberg chose not to use public campaign funds because there's restrictions on how much of that you can use.

32:21Instead, he self-funded it. At that time, Forbes estimated he was worth$4 billion. And he spent$73 million on his campaign, which meant that he was outspending his Democratic opponent five to one. And as so often happens in politics, sometimes money talks. And he took office in 2002. That's the first time in New York City history that two different Republicans got elected consecutively. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to replicate the success that he'd had on Wall Street with technology, right? So he wanted a more responsive city administration, one that was more efficient, more transparent. And to his credit, a lot of people think that he did a great job.

33:02So Bill Clinton described him as a great mayor. Obama said he was outstanding. Even their own New Yorker said that he proved, and this is a little bit shady of them, unusually adept at governing the ungovernable city. My mother-in-law lives in New York and she was a big fan of Michael Bloomberg. A lot of people gave him, as you say, glowing reviews. Cut crime rates, prosperity rose. You know, he turned a$6 billion city deficit into a$3 billion surplus. And he did something that was counter perhaps to his instincts. He raised property taxes. He was making cuts to city agencies at the time, but raising taxes, not particularly Republican or particularly Bloombergian thing to do.

33:39No, not really. But he seemed to take quite a pragmatic approach to taxes. Right. So he said taxes are not good things. But if you want services, somebody's got to pay for them. So they are necessary evil. And again, he did something quite un-Republican in that he was an advocate of gun control. Yeah, he's quite a very strange mix here of socially liberal, fiscally conservative, Wall Street kind of brain, but a social conscience, it seems. And interestingly, especially now, given the Republican Party's own politics, he was a supporter of immigration reform. And he actually said, it's as if we expect border control agents to do what a century of communism could not, defeat the natural forces of supply and demand and defeat the natural human instinct for freedom and opportunity.

34:26You may as well sit on the beach and tell the tide not to come in. That's very different from the Republicans of today, Bill DeWall. He expanded stop and search, stop and frisk, they would call it in the US, stop and search here, and said, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they say. So again, that more Republican side kind of rearing his head there. And he also did a classic mayoral fib, which will be familiar to anyone with Boris Johnson saying that he used to commute to City Hall in London on a bike. He claimed he's commuted on the subway when in reality he was chauffeured to an express subway station by a king size Chevrolet.

35:06A fascinating mix of different views there. Anti-gun, pro-immigration, but anti-minimum wage. A real strange mix. Right. It's almost like he's a pick and mix politician. He's completely guided by his own personal instincts and politics rather than that of a political party. Yeah. Well, it seemed to work. He got reelected in 2005. You're only supposed to be able to do two terms, but he found a way around that. Right. OK. How did he do that? He got the city's two-term limit law extended. So he won a third as an independent, perhaps realising he didn't really fit in either the Democrat or the Republican box.

35:43And his mayoralty, his time in office ended in 2013. So what does he do next? Back to the firm. He returns to Bloomberg in 2014 as the CEO, kind of kicks around there for about five years. And then in 2019, he comes out with his big plan. He announces his presidential campaign. And he's going to run as a Democrat. I have to say, if I was a Democrat politician at this point, I'd be like, who is this joker? Yeah. So he spends big on his campaign? He spends a billion dollars. That is a lot of money. Most of it he's spending on advertising. And it's the most that any self-funded politician in US history has ever spent.

36:24But those past comments which we ran through did come back to haunt him. He did poorly in the debates, it was thought. In one debate with Elizabeth Warren, she said a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. We are not going to defeat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many NDAs and the drip, drip, drip stories of women saying they've been harassed and discriminated against. So pretty damning. Pretty damning stuff. And in fact, that saw him off. He dropped out of the race after 104 days. That's a billion dollars spent. He won just one territory, American Samoa.

36:56Samara. Anyway, today's Bloomberg, the company, makes over$12 billion in annual revenue. It employs 23 ,000 people. It's got over 2 ,500 journalists, which makes it now one of the biggest global news organisations. But this year, he's kind of turning his attention away from it. So he announced that his 88 % stake in Bloomberg, the company, will pass on to Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is the organisation that organises his philanthropic efforts. And that's a lot of money. So he's going to score well when we get to the philanthropy section when we score them. And just this August, he announced a new chief executive and a new president.

37:31He says he's got no plans to step away. You know, in a memo de staff, he recently said, I'm not going anywhere. He's still very much in charge of the company that bears his name and always really has been. It's not one of those things where he sails off into the sunset. He wants to stay near the action. So that's where Mike Bloomberg has made it in 2023. But let's talk about his score as a billionaire. We're going to rank Michael Bloomberg out of 10 for all these categories. OK, so let's start with wealth. Well, he's nearly$100 billion. He's got to be right up there. He's the top 10, nearly 11th richest person in the world.

38:04So the FT says that only Warren Buffett has made more money out of the business of money. If data really is the oil of the 21st century, then Michael Bloomberg is today's John D. Rockefeller. And he knows how to spend it. He got a pilot's license back in 1976 and now owns, we're told, six aeroplanes and two helicopters. Wow. I mean, in four years alone, up till 2020, his private jets took more than 1 ,700 trips. But at the same time, again, a contradiction. Even though he's got six aeroplanes and two helicopters, apparently he still goes for his fortnightly appointment for a same$35 haircut. OK, so wealth.

38:42Where do we score him? He's certainly a character. And I feel like all the billionaires on this podcast are characters. But, you know, some people jump out more than others. And I say Bloomberg is one of them. You can just see him swanning around Manhattan, can't you, with loads of cash in his Chevy Suburban. And he's also got nearly$100 billion. I'm going to give him a solid nine. I'm going to give him a nine. I mean, how you've explained the Bloomberg terminal. I mean, this man is going to keep earning money from that machine to the day he dies. He's probably going to get even richer as long as he doesn't blow all his money on the next presidential bid.

39:16It's amazing, actually, that Bloomberg has still got this incredible dominant position after decades when you've had so many other technological advances. You had Google, you've had all this kind of stuff, you've got AI coming along. That might be the only thing that kind of loosens his stranglehold, because if you go to any Wall Street bank, you go to anyone in the city of London, it's all still there and it's been there for decades. You know, there's probably a young entrepreneur listening to this podcast now thinking, well, there's an opportunity for disruption. Yeah. Good luck to you. OK. Rags to riches.

39:49This is how far people have come. Remember when we did Oprah Winfrey? She literally was dressed in rags and became a five billion dollar fortune. Well, no one's going to beat that. And definitely not Michael Bloomberg. He described himself as a working class kid from Medford. I wouldn't call him working class exactly. John Hopkins University followed by Harvard MBA followed by Solomon Brothers doesn't quite add up to Rags to Riches to me. Middle class, if anything. Solidly middle class. How would you score him? He is very rich, but he didn't start in rags. No. I'll give him a four. I would give him a middle of the road five.

40:27Okay, got it. Villainy. This is where some of those alleged comments, particularly about women, will count very much against him. You've also got the fact that Bloomberg has had dozens of lawsuits against it and people think that the culture and the tone was set from the top. So that doesn't score particularly well. You know, this is not to excuse those alleged comments in any way or make excuses for Bloomberg's culture and organisation. Having said that, the Wall Street of the 80s and 90s, it was a very broad based, very deep misogyny that was imbued in the culture in those days. So if you're a product of that environment, perhaps it's no surprise, but certainly no excuse.

41:09I think that's a good way of looking at it. It contextualizes it, but it doesn't excuse it. But certainly you think to yourself, you know, hey, you're the head of a company now. You can set the culture. You can set the tone unless you don't think there's anything wrong with it. Yeah, no, it's problematic for sure. He's also apparently the kind of person who, and this is, I remember my dad once said to me, he said, never trust anyone who is nice to you and rude to the waiter. So he's the kind of person who'd be rude to the waiter. Oh, yeah. In fact, I think his daughter said once that when service was poor at a restaurant, he would really go for the waiter.

41:47And that she remembers as a little kid saying, oh, my God, Dad, don't make a scene. Be quiet. Be quiet. And a friend from Harvard Business School said, look, what you see is what you get. 100 % honesty. He's an aggressive guy. And if you don't like that, you don't. So again, that kind of macho, aggressive Wall Street culture, right? So villainy. Gosh, you go first. At first, I was tempted to go relatively soft on him because, you know, like you say, he is a product of that whole Wall Street environment. And you would have to be a real outlier to not emerge from that with that kind of sexist mentality.

42:22but now that I think more about what he said in court about you know an unimpeachable third party witness would need to be there to witness sexual assault for it to be proved you know all those kind of comments I mean come on I think that sexist comments you know workplace misogyny it makes you villainous in and of itself but if you put it into context against all the other billionaires that we've ranked you know we're talking actual arms dealers you know how far this Bloomberg come up against them, I would give him a six out of villainy, but only because he's up against literal arms traffickers, which is probably not a compliment to him.

43:01Okay, fair enough. Yeah. I'm going to agree with you then. I'm going to go middle of the road five on that one. He's not an arms dealer. He's not a drug trafficker. He hasn't killed anyone, as far as we know. He hasn't killed anyone. But, you know, I think people will be, you know, People listening now who don't remember those years of the Wall Street kind of culture will be amazed. Because I worked in finance for a little bit myself. And even I am amazed at how unenlightened it was. And that's not that long ago. And if you compare it to today, it's just really, really jarring and stark. OK, one of our categories is philanthropy.

43:35We hinted at that earlier. His philanthropic venture, that's going to be a lot of money. Yeah, so that was founded in 2006. So quite a while ago, Bloomberg Philanthropies was set up. So it donates to the arts, education, the environment, public health, government innovation. So in 2022 alone, it invested$1.7 billion around the world. And his own website claims that over his lifetime, Mike has given$14.4 billion to philanthropy. And crucially, I mean, this is now becoming the litmus test for me for philanthropy. he has also signed the giving pledge which is that pledge that was set up where billionaires say they're going to give away most of their money this is by bill gates and lauren buffett set that up didn't they exactly so he signed that as far back as 2010 and actually giving away between 10 and 20 percent of his wealth and only 11 have ever given away more than 20 percent so we've got to score him pretty highly oh yeah so i think i would probably give him a solid eight yeah he's not quite as generous as chuck feeney as a percentage of his wealth one of our previous billionaires.

44:37He's a lot more generous than someone like Jeff Bezos has been so far. So I think I think eight does sound right. I'm going to agree with you. Eight for me. Eight out of 10 for philanthropy. Now let's talk about power. How much power does Michael Bloomberg have? Not as much as he'd like. I mean, unlike a lot of our billionaires, he's actually been enormously financially successful, but chosen to divert his own finances and quite a substantial bit of his own money into pursuing traditional political power, which is quite rare among the people we've covered so far. Yeah, most people want to sort of buy rockets and all that kind of stuff.

45:14He actually sort of went, as you say, the traditional route, turning wealth into mainstream political power. How successful he was at that, you can argue. He clearly thinks he has got a lot of influence with different candidates. We played that clip when he says, I want to be able to have a word in the ear of this person or that person. so he clearly wants to and thinks he is politically powerful although he was mayor of New York for three terms and that is a powerful position. Yeah, one of the most powerful cities in the world but to be honest I think most of his power derives from the fact that he owns the Bloomberg terminal, right?

45:47I mean there isn't a competitor as far as I know. There are other people out there who do similar things but no one's got the grip on the plumbing of the financial system the way his company does. So when you think about it, his technology, his product undergirds the whole financial system of the world. That's incredible. That's a huge amount of power. If he suddenly woke up one day and randomly decided to turn it all off, what would happen? I don't think he could do that. I mean, that would be a bit like Bill Gates deciding to switch off every desktop computer and sort of disable Windows and disable Word and Excel.

46:23I just can't see that ever happening. So I'm not sure how much actual power it gives him. But certainly, in terms of the stamp he's left, well, maybe this is for legacy, which we'll talk about in a minute. But you know, the Bloomberg organisation is still a very powerful one. Chief executives, politicians, wants to be on their programme. Even though it doesn't make a whole lot of money, it has enormous financial influence as a channel and as a news organisation as well. So I think he does wield political power because he said, I'm not going anywhere. He's still very much in the driving seat there.

46:53So how much would you give him? On power, I'd give him seven. I would give him an eight. I think he seems like a pretty powerful guy. He doesn't just make the news, right? He kind of runs it. He owns it. OK, so seven from me, eight from you. And then Legacy. As someone who worked in finance, the fact is that that machine is still on every trader's desk in the world. Like I said, if money makes the world go round, Bloomberg makes the money go round. So Legacy, I'd give him a nine, to be honest, for Legacy. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think Michael Bloomberg would like to think that when the obituaries are written about him, they would pay more attention to his political adventures and accomplishments.

47:38But actually, I think what they're going to come down to is the Bloomberg terminal. So I would give him a nine, to be honest, because, yeah, like you say, it's an enormously powerful piece of technology that till now has not really been supplanted. No, that's right. It's got an iron grip on that plumbing. So then we have to ask this terrible question at the end. Is it good, bad or just another billionaire? He's such a strange mix of people. He's got these kind of anti-gun, pro-immigration, pro-environment, anti-minimum wage, creating a culture of misogyny, which reflected the kind of Wall Street of its time, macho, misogynistic, buccaneering capitalism, which I think most people find marginally offensive.

48:24So I'm going to say marginally bad. Well, he's an interesting one in that his entire life is this question of how much can you reinvent yourself? How much can you shake off what you used to be in the past? Or how much can the past kind of drag you back in there? You know, that old past of sexist Wall Street background, you know, how much can that torpedo your own personal ambition? I mean, now I'm pitching for the biopic, really, like he deserves to have a biopic about him. Is he good, bad or just another billionaire? I think he's just tipping into bad. But I think you could mount a very vigorous defence of him just being just another billionaire, albeit one of the more fascinating ones out there.

49:04OK, that's a spectacular bit of fence sitting. You just did that. Oh, yeah. OK, I'm going to say marginally bad. I think you're saying tipping over. Just, yeah, I think we're in the same place. Yeah. Michael Bloomberg, marginally bad. But who knows, maybe the next president of the United States, if he gets his way, he's still got more money to burn.

49:27So, Zing, we're taking a bit of a break over the holidays. And what are you going to do? Well, I'm going to be in Hong Kong visiting family and stuffing my face of dim sum. Dim sum. Is there a Christmas Day meal? We'll probably try and get some turkey. But, I mean, I can eat turkey any day. It's dim sum all the way. What are you going to do for the Christmas period? I'm going to go to deepest, darkest Devon, light a fire and not come out for a whole week. That sounds lovely. and next episode we've got h to the iso v to the is a himself yeah he's got 99 problems but the cash ain't one mr beyonce knowles mr j z so subscribe to make sure you don't miss that in your feed and perhaps use the holiday period to catch up on some of the billionaires you may have missed thanks for listening to good bad billionaire this podcast is produced by hannah herford and mark ward james cook is our editor and it's a bbc audio production and we'll catch you here next time yeah on bbc sounds or wherever you get your podcasts have a good holiday

50:43my name's joe wilkinson and i'm doing a podcast because i love football but all i love more is the idea of being friends with a professional footballer. The footballer I'd like to be friends with is Patrick Bamford. Hello, Patrick. Will you be my friend? That's yet to be decided. OK, not what I was hoping. My Mates of Footballer is a new BBC Sounds podcast with me, Patrick Bamford and Joe Wilkinson. Some days he'll hate it, other days he won't and eventually he will fall in love with me. Search for My Mates of Footballer on BBC Sounds.