Bloomberg, Michael Rubens, 1942–, American businessman and politician, mayor of New York City (2002–2013), b. Boston, Mass., B.S. Johns Hopkins, 1964, M.B.A. Harvard, 1966. Rising quickly in the financial industry, he ran Salomon Brothers' information technology department and became a partner. In 1981, after a merger, he was fired, but anticipating a growing need for business information, he used his $10 million severance to start a financial data and communications company, Bloomberg L.P. The company grew rapidly into a huge multifaceted enterprise that provides real-time financial and business data, historical data and analysis, and electronic communications and produces television and radio programs. Bloomberg became a multibillionaire and a noted philanthropic donor, especially to Johns Hopkins. Long a Democrat, he ran in 2001 for New York mayor as a Republican, spending record-breaking amounts of his own money, and was elected to succeed Rudolph Giuliani. He was reelected in 2005. In 2007 he quit the Republican party, becoming an independent, but after mayoral term limits were ended he won (2009) a third and final term as a Republican. In 2014 he was appointed United Nations special envoy for cities and climate change, becoming special envoy for climate action in 2018. In 2019 he became a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, but withdrew in 2020 after a poor showing in the primaries.
See his autobiography (1997); biographies by J. Purnick (2009), C. McNickle (2017), and E. Randolph (2019).
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