Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers with a $10 million partnership payout and used it to build a terminal that told traders what bonds were actually worth. This is his account, written while the company was still ascending.
The strategy that looks like ego
“If we were going to build our business, we, too, needed a personality. The obvious choice? Me. Our competitors’ founders, Messrs. Dow, Jones, Reuter, Knight, and Ridder, were all dead.”
— Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg by Bloomberg That is a considered substitution, not vanity. He had no advertising budget against Dow Jones and Reuters, and a living founder who would fly anywhere to demonstrate the product was the asset he did have. Traders eventually stopped distinguishing the man from the machine and started calling the terminal “a Bloomberg” — which is exactly what the strategy was for.
Where to be sceptical
The book was written near the top of the first act, and it shows. Bloomberg presents the firm’s culture — demanding, in-office, relentlessly sales-driven — as obviously correct rather than as a set of trade-offs. He is candid about competitors and markets and incurious about what the environment was like for people who were not him.
