Michael Bloomberg

Michael R. Bloomberg runs Bloomberg L.P., one of the world's largest financial information, news, and media companies. Considered an industry mogul by most accounts, Bloomberg is best known for parlaying his financial information services upstart into a billion dollar media giant that competes with the likes of Dow Jones, Knight-Ridder, and Reuters. Despite Bloomberg's initial reluctance to compete on the Internet—a medium he viewed as targeting a much more general audience than the one his company served—his firm's Web site, launched in 1995, became one of the most frequently visited financial information sites on the Internet. In 2001, Bloomberg resigned as chairman of his firm, and ran successfully for the office of mayor of New York City. His term was expected to begin in 2002.

A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Bloomberg graduated from John Hopkins University in 1964 and from Harvard Business School two years later. He spent many of the early years of his career working in equity trading and sales for securities trader Salomon Brothers Inc., where he eventually achieved general partner status and headed up the development of an in-house computerized financial system. Salomon Brothers fired Bloomberg in October of 1981. After pocketing millions of dollars by selling off his Salomon Brothers stock, Bloomberg considered founding his own company.

Five months later, he established Innovative Market Systems (IMS) and put together a team of computer programmers to develop something he believed Wall Street sorely needed: a computerized information system that would grant subscribers, mainly Wall Street firms, access to real-time securities market data via a desktop terminal. In 1983, Bloomberg and his partners unveiled the first such machine to Merrill Lynch, which agreed to order 20 terminals and pay $30 million for a 30-percent stake in the fledgling information provider. Bloomberg's timing proved fortuitous. Ready for electronic access to the kinds of financial information Bloomberg was peddling, other major firms began signing up for the terminals. Bloomberg changed his company's name to Bloomberg L.P. in 1986.

Perhaps Bloomberg's keenest move in growing his company was convincing the New York Times to publish Bloomberg Business News articles with the Bloomberg byline in exchange for providing the newspaper with a free terminal. By 1992, Bloomberg had secured a similar deal with every major newspaper, virtually guaranteeing his firm's name recognition among financial news readers.

By the end of the 1990s, Bloomberg was publishing magazines and producing radio and television shows. The company also was operating a Web site with live broadcasts and an electronic trading vehicle, and making its information available over mobile devices like pagers. By placing real-time financial data at the fingertips of securities investors, Bloomberg not only launched a successful business, he also played an instrumental role in the industry's increasing reliance on online mediums. His firm's success in the twenty-first century, according to several analysts, depends on how Bloomberg handles competition from two fronts: the deluge of financial information increasingly made available for free on the Internet (a medium Bloomberg discounts as too unreliable to become a major threat) and the cheaper versions of Bloomberg-like information provided by competitors Reuters and Bridge Information Systems.