What You Can Learn From The Most Successful Person of All Time

Michael Bloomberg is the co-founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. and the former Mayor of New York City. His net worth is roughly $109 billion.

Lesson 1: Be Frugal

• A headhunter once called a Bloomberg L.P. employee to ask whether it was true that the company put 10 people to an office and that Michael had every desk cut in half.

Lesson 2: Make Memorable Experiences

• In his first run for New York City mayor, Bloomberg outspent the Democratic candidate, Mark Green, by roughly five to one. Every street corner, building, stadium, and TV station in the city was covered in "Bloomberg for Mayor."
• He throws absurdly expensive parties. One Christmas the theme was the seven deadly sins and the bill came to $1.5 million.

Lesson 3: Work Hard

• Physics undergrad, then a Harvard MBA, then Salomon Brothers, where he worked 12 hour days six days a week. After a year he was promoted to stockbroker and made the firm a fortune on the strength of his selling. He stayed 15 years, and then they pushed him out.
• He worked like that and still made time to date and party.

Lesson 4: Have Extreme Self-Confidence

• When Salomon Brothers let him go, he walked away with $10 million. That is enough to retire on. Instead he started Bloomberg L.P., hired employees, and paid their salaries out of his own $10 million.
• He ran for president in 2020 and lost to Biden 💀. The biggest L of his career.

Lesson 5: Break the Rules

• New York City limits mayors to two consecutive terms. Bloomberg had already served two when, in 2008, he argued that only a businessman could steer the city through the Great Recession. The City Council voted 29 to 22 to extend the limit, and he won a third term.
• In the early days of Bloomberg L.P., Michael ran the electrical wiring for the office computers himself, on nights and weekends. He has said he's glad the fire department and Local 3, the New York electricians union, never caught them.
• He hates process: "Whenever one of my employees designs a form or writes a memo, I walk out into the hallway and make a big deal of tearing it up. The last thing we need are lots of forms and procedures and policies."
• "Make the customer think he's getting laid when he's getting fucked."

Lesson 6: Be Bold

• "A good salesperson asks for the order. It's like the guy who goes into a bar, and walks up to every gorgeous girl there, and says 'Do you want to fuck?' He gets turned down a lot, but he gets fucked a lot, too!"
• "I owe Merrill Lynch a great debt. In 1981, when we began this company, I went to every [company on Wall Street] to try to get them to buy our system. At that time, everyone was too busy building their own in-house stuff to take interest. But Merrill Lynch said 'We have our own project going, but in case it doesn't work out, we'll take twenty of your terminals.' It was that initial order for twenty terminals that started this company."

Lesson 7: Let the Customer Name the Product

• The Bloomberg Terminal launched as the MarketMaster. Customers kept calling it "the Bloomberg," so that became the name.

Lesson 8: Love What You Do For Work

• "Everyone I know who is successful loves what they do. The question is: Are they successful because they love what they do, or do they love what they do because they are successful? I don't know. I suspect it's a combination of both."
• Careers are flywheels, and they spin both directions. Like the job, and you put in the hours, get good, collect the perks, and want to get better. Hate it, and you coast, perform badly, get criticized, and coast harder.

Lesson 9: Be a Business, Investment, and Political Strategist

• Focus on software, sales, and content marketing.
• On getting ahead inside a company:
  • Befriend the most powerful person you can reach. Come in early and stay late, because that is when you get them one-on-one.
  • Walk into executive meetings with a notepad. If anyone asks, you're taking the minutes.
  • Take a low-status job at the highest-status firm you can get into. Bloomberg was a clerk and salesman at Salomon Brothers. Salary matters far less than proximity to smart people.
  • Always remember names. On his customers: "I know their middle names, and the names of their first born children."
• On politics as a market: A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg ran for mayor in 2001 as a Republican because the Republican nomination was far less contested. In 2020 he ran for president as a Democrat because that was the ticket with a path.
• On product and pricing:
  • "We build what we think people need, and what they tell us they need, not what our competitors have."
  • "I never understood the concept of volume discounts."
  • "The biggest mistake IBM made was going open architecture. The reason Apple is successful today is because they refused to open their system up. It is a strategic choice of mine to retain control over the product and the way it is delivered."
  • "We have a definite pricing strategy that flies in the face of our competition. We have a razor/razorblade marketing strategy, except we define the razorblade the opposite of our competition. Quotron, Reuters, and Telerate have long since penetrated their respective markets, so the only way for them to grow, to get incremental revenue, is to charge extra for each new service they add onto their systems. We, on the other hand, have just begun to penetrate our markets. We ask our customers to pay $1000/month, and for that price they get everything. And we have an incentive to add more capability to our system, because we will get incremental revenue from placing incremental terminals within our existing customer base."
• On the news business: "It's like Business Week. Some get it Monday, some get it Friday, and for $20 some get it Thursday." That is information arbitrage. The information is free on Monday if you know where to look. Everyone else pays to see it Thursday, one day before it becomes obvious.
• On reading a market before it moves: "Municipals will be a very big product over the next ten years. It's a classic case: the business can't get worse. Issues out there now are going to rollover, and there will be lots of new issues to rebuild all the bridges and roads that are falling apart 50 years after the 1930s public works programs. The Federal Government is going to support localities more, not less. And tax rates will only go up. Reagan just forgot to consult me when he put together tax reform."
• On the competition: "With the exception of the municipal people, the equity people are the dumbest in the world, especially the block traders."
• On trust as a product feature: "Years ago we ran a testimonial ad in Institutional Investor featuring quotes from some of our customers. My favorite came from the guy who said 'I have yet to find an error in the MARKETMASTER data, but when I do, I'll know it's an honest error, unlike the data I get from Salomon or First Boston.'"
• On scale: "The culture of this company hasn't really changed since when we were 14 employees. I think we can keep the culture going until we reach about 2,000. 2,000 is when I felt the change at Salomon [Brothers]."

Lesson 10: Look At Every Statue In Your City, You'll Find No Statues of Committees

• Someone has to decide: "Lotus Version 3 is no more complex than Lotus Version 1 was, except that now Lotus has 3,000 employees instead of just Mitch Kapor. That's why they can't get Version 3 out the door. I don't want that to happen to us."

Lesson 11: Entrepreneurs Are Aggressive On Timing

• Marc Andreessen explains why: "Entrepreneurs, by definition, are highly optimistic people. They're usually so optimistic that they're too aggressive on timing. They think the product will get to market faster than it's actually going to."
• Bloomberg employees joked that you needed a translation guide for Michael's timelines:
  • "It's going over in the next set of software we move." (two weeks)
  • "It'll be ready next week." (two months)
  • "It'll be ready in two weeks." (eight months)
• Elon Musk runs the same clock on Tesla's Full Self-Driving, which has been arriving by the end of the year for years now.

Lesson 12: Money Does Not Guarantee Success

• Bloomberg spent more than $1 billion on his 2020 presidential campaign. He won American Samoa.

Lesson 13: A Single Conversation Can Change Your Life

• Out of his Harvard MBA program, Bloomberg had no idea what he wanted to do and had never considered Wall Street. A friend told him to call Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs and ask for a job. He called. He stayed at Salomon for 15 years.

Personal Life

• "I make it a rule never to go to Queens, and since that eliminates both airports I don't travel a great deal."
• "There are certain states you don't go to."
• "We live in Manhattan so we don't have to go anyplace else."
• "I would have married lots of my girlfriends if they'd bothered to ask. My wife is the only one with the guts to ask me."
• "The only liberal I trust is a rich old liberal. Why? Because they're old enough to understand what they're saying, and they're rich enough to pay for what they say!"
• His code of ethics: "The first rule is 'Don't leave the toilet seat down.'"
• In the 1990s, several female employees sued Bloomberg L.P. for sexual harassment, describing a company Michael had built with the culture of a frat house. Among the quotes attributed to him in those filings:
  • "You know why computers will never take the place of people? Because a computer would say that the sex of the person giving you a blow job doesn't matter!"
  • "[The Bloomberg terminal] will do everything, including give you a blowjob. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business."
• In 2019 he was the largest charitable donor in the United States.