“American politician, elected the 108th Mayor of New York City on November 6, 2001, succeeding Rudy Giuliani. In the worlds of finance and financial journalism, Michael Bloomberg is a phenomenon. From a modest background, the son of a bookkeeper and a homemaker he is now the 41st richest American (82nd in the world) with a net worth of $4.5 billion (as of 2002), he runs a vast communications empire that takes in $2.5 billion a year in revenue and employs more than 8,000 people in more than 100 offices worldwide.
With student loans and a part time job of parking cars, he earned an engineering degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and continued to Harvard Business School for two years. He began work as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers firm in 1966, becoming a partner in 1972. He was soon supervising all of Salomon's stock trading, sales and later, its information systems. But his relationship with Salomon ended abruptly after the company was purchased by the Phibro Corporation in 1981 and he was fired, a move he called political back-stabbing.
Bloomberg used his $10 million severance package to start his own firm. He persuaded Merrill-Lynch to back his plan to build a system that supplied data and analysis of that data. Prior to then, all trading information was in bookkeeping ledgers and past issues of financial journals. Tapping into the capacity of electronics, Bloomberg built a service of current and past information for the business community to access, a company that is now indispensable to the financial world. Once he delivered, the firm put up a critical $30 million for a 30% stake. Later, Merrill Chief Executive Daniel P. Tully graciously waived Bloomberg's exclusive contract with Merrill so he could market his service to others. By 2000, Bloomberg L.P. has nearly 160,000 subscribers worldwide. Bloomberg News was launched in 1990, providing economic, business, political and sports stories to leading corporations, financial institutions and newspapers throughout the world. Bloomberg Radio followed in 1993, a general news station with an emphasis on business and the markets. The following year, Bloomberg TV made a debut and has expanded to ten different networks broadcasting in seven languages worldwide.”
