MIKE BLOOMBERG
Who is Mike Bloomberg: Why work in financial services? Mike Bloomberg has used a successful career on Wall Street as a springboard to achievements in other fields: first, as an entrepreneur in financial information services, next in broadcast media, now in politics, where he has earned a high profile nationally.
Biography: Mike Bloomberg was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1942. He earned an engineering degree from Johns Hopkins, and an MBA from Harvard. He joined Salomon Brothers in New York in 1966, eventually rising to head their trading information systems.
In a post-merger management shakeup, Mike Bloomberg was forced out of Salomon in 1981. With partial funding from Merrill Lynch (which retains a minority stake to this day), he founded his own firm, Bloomberg LP. Through proprietary terminals, Bloomberg LP delivers news, market data and state of the art analytics, primarily to securities traders. Bloomberg terminals have been a vital resource to the industry since the 1980s.
In the 1990s, Bloomberg entered mass media, with a New York radio station and a cable TV channel devoted to news, with particular emphasis on financial coverage. A multi-billionaire by the 1990s, he self-financed a successful, but highly expensive, campaign to become mayor of New York in 2001, as newly-enacted term limits forced Rudolph Giuliani out of office. After another expensive campaign in 2005, Bloomberg won re-election in a landslide. Term limits preclude him from seeking a third term in 2009. There was speculation for a time about whether Bloomberg would be an independent candidate for President in 2008.
Lessons: Mike Bloomberg is a classic case of someone who made a fortune in the financial services industry, then used that wealth to forge a new and different career path. Moreover, Bloomberg also is a lesson in surviving layoffs and corporate restructurings: when he lost his lucrative position at Salomon Brothers, he used the expertise that he gained there to become a wildly successful entrepreneur.
Lastly, Mike Bloomberg offers a study in exerting self-control to remake one’s image, to suit the situation. As head of Bloomberg LP, he had a reputation for being a volatile personality, prone to angry outbursts and intemperate language. As a politician, he adopted a completely opposite persona: cool and calm to the point of being rather wooden and colorless. Now that his second (and final) mayoral term is past the halfway point, several of his key initiatives have been stymied by political opponents, and the odds of his seeking higher office seem to be diminishing, Bloomberg’s old self appears to be reasserting itself, according to press reports.