The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

by Eleanor Randolph

  The Times Pulitzer disappointed and infuriated Winkler. Even worse for the company, China’s officials blocked or slowed access to press events for Bloomberg reporters. The Bloomberg News website was also blocked in China,42 and Chinese officials suddenly appeared at Bloomberg offices for unannounced inspections for “safety” or “security.”43 The company had become another news organization (like the Times and the Journal) that was having great difficulty getting residency visas for its journalists.44 The sales of Bloomberg Terminals stalled, and it became harder to get the kind of financial data out of China that Bloomberg’s terminal users needed around the world.

  Bloomberg officials were not happy with a drop in terminal sales, but they could cope. The real problem was that the Bloomberg system could not thrive without the best and fastest possible financial data out of China, and the top officials in China knew it. “If you’re half a second slower than Reuters, there’s trouble,” said one former Bloomberg insider. “That was huge leverage over Bloomberg for the Chinese.”45

  After the Polk Award and praise from Winkler, Richardson and Forsythe and the team in Hong Kong prepared another investigative package they believed was ready to go. It had footnotes, the okay from lawyers, and even praise from Bloomberg editors back home.46

  Then, as they waited for final approval in late October 2013, the bureau got a call from Winkler. On speakerphone,47 he explained that their latest investigative effort would not be published as written because, frankly, it could offend China’s prickly leadership. Winkler as much as acknowledged that it was an act of self-censorship, and Bloomberg sources told the Times for a front-page story that Winkler had compared it to the way foreign bureaus curbed their outrage in order to cover Nazi-era Germany.48

  Winkler publicly denied for a while that the China stories were actually killed. He said that what the Hong Kong bureau had produced was a proposal, not a story, and he thought the Times was “unfair” and even “dishonest,” first by failing to write glowingly about Bloomberg’s original blockbuster series and then accusing him—on the front page, no less—of killing what was an unfinished follow-up series. Winkler also fumed about the reporting of a “private” conversation on speakerphone that was taped by a member of his Hong Kong bureau and passed along to the media. Even years later, he remained furious at Bloomberg’s top investigator, Michael Forsythe, the thirteen-year veteran at Bloomberg,49 who Winkler decided had leaked the tape. Forsythe, who never actually denied passing the conversation along to other reporters, was suspended then fired from the Hong Kong bureau within a few days after the Times article. He later joined the Times staff in Asia.50

  The firing of Forsythe began the unraveling of the Bloomberg investigative unit. The editor, Amanda Bennett, moved on shortly after the Winkler phone call. Ben Richardson held on for a few more months, but he said, on leaving, that “I left Bloomberg because of the way the story was mishandled, and because of how the company made misleading statements in the global press and senior executives disparaged the team that worked so hard to execute an incredibly demanding story.”51 One former Bloomberg reporter said that many of them signed on to the Bloomberg Way because Bennett and Winkler had said they wanted Bloomberg News to be the most influential news organization in the world. “And we believed it,” the journalist said sadly.

  Anyone who missed the message after Winkler’s call and Forsythe’s firing got the word clearly enough a short time later when Peter Grauer, chairman of Bloomberg LP and a longtime personal friend of Bloomberg, came to Hong Kong.

  “We have to be there,” Grauer told a group of business leaders at the Asia Society, meaning that Bloomberg LP had to expand in China. He said that the news operation “should have rethought” publishing some pieces—a comment that appeared to point directly at the Hong Kong investigations. Grauer also reportedly told the Hong Kong reporters that the company’s sales team had been forced to do a “heroic job” repairing company relations with the Chinese.52 And one source at the bureau reported that Grauer warned the company would be “back in the shitbox” if “we were to do anything like that again.”53

  Bloomberg himself had withheld any public comment about China or Goldman Sachs while he was finishing his last hectic year as mayor. But soon after he left office, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Bloomberg on CNBC whether his company had “muzzled” its journalists covering China. Bloomberg avoided a direct answer. The Chinese “have rules about what you can publish,” he said. “We follow those rules and if you don’t follow the rules, you’re not in the country.”54

  At his first meeting with the news staff after he was mayor, he repeated the point that if a country gives you a license with restrictions, you either comply or you leave. “The thing that hurt me the most is that some people tried to make this something we should be ashamed of, and we have nothing to be ashamed of,” he told the staff. “There are things that the press shouldn’t be doing and can’t,” he added. As for the ethics of Bloomberg News while he was away as mayor, “We have zero to be apologetic for.”55

  * * *

  Even so, Bloomberg recognized that he had a problem with Winkler. Before he announced plans to retake control of the business at the end of 2014, Bloomberg had started asking who should replace him.56 Soon, he produced his answer. Ever an Anglophile with two homes and what would become a showplace European headquarters being built in London, Bloomberg had sometimes been mentioned as a billionaire reputable enough to buy The Economist. Instead, he hired its editor, John Micklethwait, a fifty-two-year-old former banker who had been running the magazine for eight years.

  If Mike Bloomberg was looking for Winkler’s opposite, he had found it in Micklethwait. The new editor was British born, Oxford educated, and every ounce the classic Anglo-aristocrat who could chart his bloodline back to William the Conqueror.57 Micklethwait had briefly tried banking and then moved to The Economist, one of Bloomberg’s favored publications. It was an elite, 171-year-old operation, excellently written (no bylines) with claims to sit in the “radical center”58 of British politics. Bloomberg, an avowed centrist himself, saw a soul mate, but it would still be a big step for the Brit. Micklethwait went from overseeing a collegial operation with 130 mostly well-behaved employees to Winkler’s fast and turbulent media arena with 2,500 employees across the globe.59

  Micklethwait took over Bloomberg News in February 2015, and two months later, Winkler’s team finally won the golden Pulitzer Prize. Zachary Mider, one of the stars remaining on Winkler’s investigative team, won for explanatory reporting about how corporations dodge taxes by hiding U.S. profits abroad. The Poynter Institute columnist James Warren spoke for many in old-line, mainstream media when he wrote, “Goliath came out of the shadows Monday.”60 At the company ceremony, when Micklethwait made the announcement, Bloomberg nudged Winkler and said, grinning, “What took you so fucking long?”61 It was supposed to be a joke.

  Winkler had made his mistakes in twenty-five years, but he had achieved what he thought Bloomberg wanted. From a few rewrite serfs churning out public relations updates for terminal users, Winkler had created a massive news organization rivaling Dow Jones and the New York Times and Reuters in day-to-day coverage of business and finance. But Bloomberg News had outgrown Winkler’s red-faced, nitro school of management.

  Bloomberg, the boss redux, also saw parts of the new media world that did not fit with his original mission of business news for businesspeople. He would soon fire some of the bright, young editors brought in to give buzz to Bloomberg Businessweek or to add luster to the television coverage. He reportedly rejected some efforts to increase viewership of Bloomberg Television. (In 2013, the audience was so small it was not rated by Nielsen.) Doctoroff had overseen the hiring of two star political journalists, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, at a reported $1 million each. Their television show, With All Due Respect, which ran on the Bloomberg News cable channel and MSNBC, didn’t get much respect from viewers, however, and Bloomberg had to apologize for one of his jokes about
the duo. He called them Haldeman and Ehrlichman during a talk with the Washington staff. Their lush contract expired with the 2016 elections.62

  Micklethwait had already started returning the news operation to basics. Six months after he arrived, he had sent out a long memo about where Bloomberg News was going. It sounded very familiar.

  Micklethwait’s memo, which he released after he had fired eighty people (including at least one who had written a memo complaining about chaos at Bloomberg News),63 referred to his downsizing as “refocusing our considerable resources.” And he decreed that Bloomberg News would be “the chronicle of capitalism.” He vowed to “expose financiers’ mistakes and vanities,” in short to alert terminal users to the flaws around them. But he wanted Bloomberg News to distinguish itself by also showing “our passion for business, finance and markets.”

  “So, if you are not intrigued by how people make money, or are inclined to sneer at those who are good at it, or yearn to practice ‘gotcha journalism’ on investment bankers simply because they’ve chosen to be bankers, Bloomberg is probably the wrong place for you.”64

  Micklethwait’s job was to organize all the various news arms into one structure. He wanted the news side to be less hierarchal. He wanted more collaboration—a Bloomberg mantra since those early days of four guys in a one-room office. Micklethwait gave a brief nod to investigative journalism but noted that he would continue to “cut back on lengthy self-indulgent stories.”

  Winkler stayed on in an emeritus position after having “stepped down” in late 2014, as he put it later.65 From the sidelines, he had to watch as Bloomberg moved Micklethwait onto the international stage. Newsroom regulars groused about the distant and inscrutable Brit, but Micklethwait soon became a prime Bloomberg interviewer of global leaders at Bloomberg’s increasing number of global meetings in New York and Asia. For example, at Bloomberg’s economic meeting in Singapore in 2018, where Bloomberg was launching his Asian version of Davos, Micklethwait talked with outgoing prime minister Lee Hsien Loong, who declared that his outpost was like a “Bonsai Tree Model of What China Is.”66 With that comment, Micklethwait, Prime Minister Lee, and Bloomberg all made the news.

  If the news division was a little more than 10 percent of Bloomberg’s army of nearly 20,000 people, it was the public face—in every medium and on every new gizmo. Inside, the company also worked to adapt to every shift in the digital stratosphere. Analytics, plain old data, new data, pricing data, regulations data, buy, sell, hold, a complete cafeteria of access and data from every business market—Bloomberg offered it all. Then there was help with managing risk, accounting. You could even estimate how much it would probably cost your two-year-old to go to a private college. While there was a lot of grousing about long hours at the company—and who doesn’t like to complain about their job?—the independent employment site Glassdoor analyzed hundreds of comments from Bloomberg workers (some anonymous) and determined in 2018 that Bloomberg got a 90 percent approval rating as CEO.67

  By that time, the Mike Bloomberg company code was cast in stone. Hire the smartest people you can find who work the hardest. Demand collaboration (especially hard for bigger egos at or near the top). Demand loyalty (but also get them to sign an agreement not to talk about the company or to disparage the bosses and the terminal). Return that loyalty with nice, warm paychecks and top-of-the-line health care and bonuses and, of course, free food—breakfasts or snacks or a complete cafeteria like the one in Princeton, where delis were a car ride away.

  His company had open spaces in every office in every major country. “I issue proclamations telling everyone to work together, but it’s the lack of walls that make them do it,” he insisted.68 He once admitted that in the early days when there were more people than office space, he had a carpenter come in on a Friday night and cut eighteen inches off of each worker’s desk. Apparently workers were so accustomed to being a tightly knit operation, it took a while for them to catch on.69

  But for all the lack of personal space for his people, Bloomberg also wanted to have splendid offices so that workers would be proud to stay at work. That meant a tall glass tower like the “mother ship” in Manhattan or an elegant three-story office in Hong Kong. Then there was London.

  * * *

  On a cool October day in 2017, a very proud Michael Bloomberg stood with London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, installation artist Cristina Iglesias, and the famous architect who designed the two buildings that served as his stunning backdrop, Lord Norman Foster.

  Foster was famous for the “gherkin,” the bullet-shaped skyscraper that vied for notice in London’s skyline with other high-end works—a needle-thin tower called the Shard (Renzo Piano) and another that looked like a giant, old-fashioned walkie-talkie (Rafael Viñoly). In Hong Kong, Foster had built a bank that was supposed to be like a Lego building that you could change or even dismantle if mainland China became too unfriendly. Perhaps more important for Bloomberg, Foster was one of the first high-end architects to create open-plan office buildings.

  Bloomberg, who often called London his second home (although he actually had two homes in the city), did not want a splashy office skyscraper. He wanted a building that inspired his employees, of course, a place that could fit less conspicuously in the historic center of London. As an engineer, he wanted every possible technology to save energy and make the building a showplace for sustainability. And he wanted to show the world that an American businessman cared about public art and archaeology.

  He began working on his new European headquarters while he was still mayor. For the then-mayor’s rare visits to the Bloomberg offices in Manhattan, he often inspected a model of the Foster building. Foster took notes at their first meeting. They said the exterior had to be “respectful, fitting in, understated, classy.” Inside, it was to be “organic and dynamic.” By some accounts, with two strong personalities involved, it became a long and difficult birth. Bloomberg kept a close watch on the builder and the building, and he joked at the opening that “some people say that the reason it took us almost a decade to build this is that we had a billionaire who wanted to be an architect working with an architect who wanted to be a billionaire.”70 For Bloomberg and the architectural world, it was worth the struggle.

  The design is meant to sweep people up a wide corridor into a central hub (with food and fish tanks and mingling, as is the Bloomberg way). Workers labor at round desks throughout the 3.2-acre site (1.1 million square feet of office space). There is art, big public art like a large bas-relief sculpture by Cristina Iglesias, and there are environmental details that were an obvious source of pride for the billionaire/engineer. The windows, for example, have huge fins that open to real air. “Gills,” the architect called them. The ceiling was a field of LED lights, and the whole package was designed to save six hundred metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year.71

  Besides the agonies over which stone and what kind of ventilation, the building also took longer because it was built over a site where ancient Romans practiced their mysterious worship of the god Mithras. Bloomberg had given archaeologists plenty of time and support to dig up more than fourteen thousand artifacts that ranged from a phallic-inspired pin that might have held together some early Roman’s toga to tablets with early messages written in wax that appear to be the first written mention of the town London. Bloomberg reimagined the meeting hall for the mysterious cult that seemed to include the idea of Mithras killing a bull, a somewhat counterintuitive symbol for many of Bloomberg’s customers on Wall Street. But what mattered most for London’s archaeologists was that the billionaire and his team gave them time to carefully unearth the layers of British history.

  There were a few snarky reviews, of course. The Guardian complained that it was “chubby and prosaic,” that it looked like a “regional department store,” and that the Iglesias sculpture brought to mind a “fetid swamp.”72 Another writer praised the new complex, but compared it to Willy Wonka’s magic emporium. Most saw a successful effort t
o make the London headquarters into the ultimate, futuristic office building where workers had an open invitation to come together and work very, very hard, since everybody could see everybody else. When the building won Britain’s top architectural prize in 2018, Ben Derbyshire, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, said that Foster and Bloomberg “had not just raised the bar for office design and city planning, but smashed the ceiling.”73

  Bloomberg was immensely proud of his European headquarters, but as the elaborate complex was being finished, Britain suddenly voted to leave the European Union. The vote for “Brexit” sent some companies scurrying from London to Germany or Brussels to deal with their European operations. Bloomberg had argued against the withdrawal before the vote in June 2016. Two weeks before he opened his London office in 2017, Bloomberg spoke at a technology conference in Boston. Blunt as ever, he said exactly what he was thinking. “We are opening a brand new European headquarters in London—two big, expensive buildings. Would I have done it if I knew they were going to drop out? I’ve had some thoughts that maybe I wouldn’t have.” He quickly added, “But we are there [and] we are going to be very happy.”74

  Leaving Britain? Never, he later assured his friends. His ex-wife was a Brit; his two daughters had British passports. He owned two elaborate homes in London. One of them, purchased in 2015 for $25 million, $1 million over the asking price, was the historic mansion where writer George Eliot had spent her final days.75 Brexit wouldn’t send him packing, but he wouldn’t be shy about how he viewed the whole, clumsy mess. As he put it, on several occasions, Brexit was “the single stupidest thing that any country has ever done, but then we Trumped it.”76

  26

  MOVING TARGETS NOT SITTING DUCKS

  “Growth makes us a moving target, no growth makes us a sitting duck.”