HIGHLIGHTS: Michael Bloomberg

0:00Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everyone, I'm Nikolaj Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today I'm in New York and I'm in the Bloomberg offices. Now, normally when I'm in the Bloomberg offices, I see a journalist or an anchor. But today I'm seeing the man himself, Michael Bloomberg. I'm very careful to not be a journalist. The one thing you can't do is get involved in the journalism if you're going to have good journalism. So there's one guy, John McClathwape, who runs it.

0:36Mike, you just have one of the most extraordinary journeys in American business, starting Bloomberg, being mayor for 12 years, being one of the most important philanthropists. And so perhaps we can just go all the way back the day that you... I was born at an early age. Yeah, you were absolutely. No, let's start with Salman Brothers, because you were, you know, strange enough, you were at some stage laid off. And then the next day you started Bloomberg. So what do you think then? I was, grew up in Massachusetts. Father was a bookkeeper, made$6 ,000, the best year of his life. I was a Boy Scout.

1:19I was a C student. I always made the top half of the class possible, was my guideline. And when I was getting out of school, I went from college to business school at Harvard. I was lucky enough to get in. But when I was ready to graduate, I thought I was going to go to Vietnam. Partially, we were involved in that war. This was in 1966, a very nasty war in a very nasty ways. Americans treated the troops who we drafted and sent over to risk their lives. Some of them came back in boxes. and some were lucky enough and didn't. But we were just treating people terribly and so I signed up to go. I could get a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army.

2:05I thought you'd be safer as a second lieutenant than as a private. Turns out not because the second lieutenants led the charge over the barbed wire going out into the jungle and a lot of them were killed. It turns out at the last minute, one month before graduation, I have perfectly flat feet and they didn't take anybody with flat feet. And so all of a sudden, I wasn't going to go to Vietnam and I'd not thought at all about what I was going to do with my career. You took all the experience you had from Salomon and kind of put that into the startup of Bloomberg. Now, how did you come up with the idea?

2:42Because it was quite revolutionary at the time. I had worked on a trading desk and we had a couple of screens. The screens showed the prices of either stocks or bonds. and it showed the last sale or the valuation and it showed plus or minus an arrow or a different color. But there was nothing on your desk that let you do what you needed that data for and people never didn't think about that. Well, why would I need the data? I want my drawer graph. I want to do a calculation. I want to send a message, any of those kinds of things. and the computer could do it, but nobody had put it together. So I thought, why don't we build a computer to do it?

3:31Now, keep in mind, when I was doing this, PCs have not been invented then. Nobody believes that. There was a date before Apple, and I wanted to have a computer, but they didn't exist. So I hired an engineer, Ron Harris, a nice, very smart guy, and I would go up on Saturdays and work in his barn. He had a little lab set up, and I'd solder in the capacitors and resistors and the circuit boards, and we made our own computers. Now, fast forward until two years later when PCs were invented, and I said, we're getting out of the PC business. That's not what we do well. We couldn't possibly compete in here.

4:16And so we just bought a few of the first PCs and junked the other stuff. And the rest is history. In your book, you talk about the important cultural aspects. And one of them is to outwork other people. And this is an example of that, right? What does it mean in practice to outwork other people? Well, you don't say no. You don't give up. You put a balance in life. You still want to be able to go out. and have a life, a family. So it's balancing hard work with enough time off to not get worn out or that sort of thing. But you are now 83, right? 83, I'm happy to be in. My ambition is to be 84. Are you still in the office most days?

5:07I've been taking some Fridays off, which is a little bit embarrassing, but yes. Fundamentally, I like to come in. Yeah. And when are you here in the morning? I get up at 5.15 automatically. If I didn't even set the alarm, I probably would. Girlfriend and I both get up. I take a shower, do some exercises with a trainer a couple times a week, and then go to work. And I'm here by 7 at the latest, maybe a little bit earlier. Is this the kind of work ethic which everybody in Bloomberg has? An awful lot do. People here, we have very low attrition rate. People here like to be here. At least they tell me they do, and I think it looks to me like they do.

5:52You also talk about the importance of taking risks and encouraging people to take risks. What type of risks do you want people to take? You have to try things. It's a stupid idea, but maybe it might work. You can't do all the stupid ideas, and not all of them will work. But just because it's not conventional doesn't mean you shouldn't take the shot and do it. Why did you decide to run for mayor? I think somebody asked me that recently. And I think it is I was really annoyed that you kept reading that you couldn't do anything about education. Test scores were going down and everybody said you couldn't do anything about it.

6:35And I thought to myself, that's not true. I think you could do something about it. And out of that, I decided I'd run. Everybody thought I was crazy. Nobody thought I had a chance. It was the luck of the draw at that point in time. He had the right opponent who wasn't very much of a candidate or whatever. And you just got lucky and got elected. So during those 12 years, the average living age in New York increased by three years. It increased by three years, test scores went way up. It brings us to your commitment to philanthropy. Where did that come from? Because you have now given away more than$20 billion.

7:20I do remember my father. We talked about philanthropy around the dinner table home. We talked about charity, certainly. And then, you know, I'm in an enviable position. I don't need another set of golf clubs, but I do want to have the satisfaction of maybe be saving somebody's life or helping a kid get an education or curing a disease. That's heady stuff. You sit there and before you close your eyes and go to bed, it's like, oh, all right. Aren't very many people have done those things. And I'd like to do it. I've taken care of my children. They are both very philanthropic. They both have charities of their own.

8:03they've started because of my former wife, who's still one of my best friends, and I talked about it all the time. They give away part of their own money every year. Do you think you'll ever retire? No, but I think that I would change what I'm doing to give more opportunities. I've already appointed two people to be, one to be the chief executive officer, one to be the president, But I want you to be comfortable that if I drop dead, the services we're providing to you will be continued. Mike, what do you want your legacy to be?

8:46For example, Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, is one of the great universities in the country. And they do enormous amount of research and help enormous amount of people get educated and save their lives and culture and all that sort of stuff. And I want to make sure that people go back and say, you know, he really was a guy who cared about other people and then did something about it. I don't think they're going to remember me as a great golfer. It's the most ridiculous thing I do, and I'm obsessed with it. So why? But I'd like to think, and I think also my kids. like I my parents made a very big difference in my life Museum of Science in Boston made a very big difference in my life the Boy Scouts made a very big difference in my life and I'd like to say thank you to those organizations so I support the Boy Scouts I support the museum well you for sure care about people and you've done more about it than anybody as I know I mean And what an incredible life.

9:55Thank you very much. But you can do it too. Everybody can do it at a different scale. And, you know, volunteer and go in and help and put food in for deliveries of free food. And there's things you can do. And it's just so satisfying. I don't understand why people don't do it.