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The Enduring Ambition of Michael Bloomberg
The First 15 Years Building the Bloomberg Empire
Justin Gordon
February 11, 2024
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Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg started his eponymous financial data company in 1981, a company that in 2022 did more than $12 billion in revenue and one that he still owns 88% of today.
As a result, it’s made him one of the fifteen richest people in the world.
Today, we’re diving into his story and how he built the juggernaut this is Bloomberg.
To write today’s deep dive, I read the book Bloomberg by Michael Bloomberg, the revised and updated edition published in 2019. For the full story, I highly suggest you check it out.
Let’s get to it.
Early Days
Michael Bloomberg grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, a town just outside of Boston.
From his parents, he developed the attributes that would one day contribute to his outsized success:
But from them, as a child, I learned hard work, intellectual curiosity, and the ambition to strive relentlessly for the goals I set—all of which would serve me in good stead at school, during my capitalist education at Salomon, and in creating my own company later on.
Just like Travis Kalanick would many years later, selling Cutco knives in high school, Michael gathered sales experience early in life, selling Christmas wreaths door-to-door to pay for his Boy Scout summer camp lodging.
Bored throughout most of high school, two honors courses in history and literature piqued his interest and had a profound impact on him:
The exposure to history and culture opened my eyes to a whole new world. What a shame all the preceding time was partially wasted. It was an early lesson for me in how we, as a society, must find a way to better engage our children in the joys of learning.
He also learned the value of studying history:
I developed a sense of history and its legacy, and remain amazed at how little people seem to learn from the past; how we fight the same battles over and over; how we can't remember what misguided, shortsighted policies led to depression, war, oppression, and division.
While few of his high school classmates went to college, with vocational training instead being the focus, Michael took a different path.
The work ethic he displayed throughout his life was apparent early on and led him to Johns Hopkins University:
While in high school, I worked after class, on weekends, and during summers for a small electronics company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The technical genius of the company recommended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I was interested in science, and she knew people at the school's Applied Physics Laboratory. Since I had to go to college someplace, why not?
At Johns Hopkins he honed his people skills, skills he’d put to good use years later, by becoming president of his fraternity and even his class.
After Johns Hopkins, he attended Harvard Business School, graduating in 1966.
He described his time there as “well spent” but had no idea what he’d do after:
What would I do with my life? With twelve weeks until graduation, I had no plan for how I'd turn an expensive education into a living. I hadn't given it any thought, nor had I signed up for recruiting interviews.
My good friend, Steve Fenster, a Harvard classmate who later would become a member of my company's board of directors (five years before he died of cancer), told me to call the firms of Salomon Brothers & Hutzler, as it was then named, and Goldman, Sachs & Co., and to say I was desperate to be an institutional salesperson or equity trader.
Whatever path he chose, he was determined to succeed.
Salomon Brothers
Ultimately, Michael chose to work at Salomon Brothers over Goldman Sachs.
While he’d make less money, it was a better culture fit, an important component for him and why he said he’d never leave:
While many of the top firms coveted distinguished lineages, manners, accents, and Ivy League educations, Salomon was more of a meritocracy that prized go-getters, tolerated eccentricities, and treated both PhDs and high school dropouts disinterestedly. I fit in. It was me.
At Salomon in June 1996, even as a Harvard MBA, he started from the bottom:
I worked my first summer there in "the Cage," physically counting securities by hand. It was a pretty lowly start for a Harvard MBA.
We slaved in our underwear (it was virtually an all-male industry back then), in an unairconditioned bank vault, with an occasional six-pack of beer to make it more bearable.
Every afternoon, we counted out billions of dollars of actual bond and stock certificates to be messengered to banks as collateral for overnight loans.
Of course, he worked his way up the ladder, putting in more hours than almost anyone else, and building relationships with the higher-ups:
I took the subway to work and read the office copy of the Wall Street Journal upon arrival, to save the fifteen-cent newsstand cost.
I came in every morning at 7 a.m., getting there before everyone else except Billy Salomon. When he needed to borrow a match or talk sports, I was the only other person in the trading room, so he talked to me. At age twenty-six, I became a buddy of the managing partner.
I would stay later than everyone else except for John Gutfreund. When he needed someone to make an after-hours call to the biggest clients, or someone to listen to his complaints about those who'd already gone home, I was the someone. And I got a free cab ride uptown with him, the No. 2 guy in the company.
Making myself omnipresent wasn't exactly burdensome—I loved what I was doing. And, needless to say, developing a close working relationship with those who ran the show probably didn't hurt my career either.
Lesson to be learned here for the youngsters. Put in the time and build relationships.
But Michael had fun too, living by the “work hard, play hard” mantra:
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