Boston, 1942. American businessman and politician. Michael Rubens Bloomberg was born on February 14, 1942—Valentine’s Day—in a working-class neighborhood of Boston, into a middle-class family. His father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker, but young Mike had already shown since childhood that he was capable of overcoming any obstacle to rise above mediocrity.
Thanks to a scholarship, he graduated from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, although he earned his doctorate at Harvard, which, along with Yale, is one of the American universities that have produced the most presidents of the country.
In the summer of 1966, the well-known firm Salomon Brothers hired him. It was then that he discovered what it really meant to work on Wall Street. Very soon, he became supervisor of all stock transactions, sales, and information systems at the company. His talent was such that the firm made him a partner six years later. The bad news came in 1981 when the company Phibro Corporation absorbed Salomon Brothers and, for the first time, he found himself unemployed.
His first serious business move came in 1982, when he sold twenty subscriptions to his financial terminal to the company Merrill Lynch. Two decades later, he already had 160,000 subscribers spread across the world.
The enormous profits didn’t make Michael Bloomberg sit in his office counting the dollars he earned each day. On the contrary, convinced that information is power and also good business, in 1990 he created the financial news service Bloomberg News. As with all his business ventures, success didn’t take long. So much so that, by 2001, he had around 1,500 journalists working from 80 offices across five continents. Competitors like Reuters and Telerate took nearly ten years to copy the idea, more than enough time for the future mayor of New York’s business to become firmly established.
Following the founding of Bloomberg News came Bloomberg Radio, and unsurprisingly, fortune smiled on him in this new venture as well. The first broadcast took place in 1993 in the city of skyscrapers. The content of the broadcasts, which eventually could be heard on another 200 stations that partnered with Bloomberg Radio, consisted of news related to financial markets.
His innovative drive led him to make economic news on television less boring for the general public. With Bloomberg Television, the multi-screen format was established: the screen was divided to simultaneously display stock quotes from major markets around the world, charts showing exchange rate trends or commodity prices, and headlines with the day’s top stories.
He is a self-made man, something that fascinates a society like the United States, obsessed with looking in the mirror and seeing a hero to admire and celebrate. According to Forbes magazine, this man has managed to amass a fortune of around 4 billion dollars (4.08 billion euros), placing him at number 42 on the list of the richest people in the United States.