Michael Bloomberg Quotes

No place epitomizes the American experience and the American spirit more than New York City.

Those enterprises that see new needs and react more quickly, win!

If you have to compete based on capital, the giant always wins. If you can compete based on smarts, flexibility, and willingness to give more for less, then small companies like Bloomberg clearly have an advantage.

As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.

Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices.

have my own army in the NYPD—the seventh largest army in the world. —NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

And, as I would learn later on in my life - at Salomon Brothers and in my own company - it's the "doers", the lean and hungry ones, those with ambition in their eyes and fire in their bellies and no notions of social caste, who go the furthest and achieve the most.

where a Michael Bloomberg could be the CEO of a large company one day and get elected as New York’s mayor the next.

The changing climate should be seen as a series of discrete, manageable problems that can be attacked from all angles simultaneously. Each problem has a solution. And better still, each solution can make our society healthier and our economy stronger.

Pope Benedict XVI was the first to predict the crisis in the global financial system…Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti said. “The prediction that an undisciplined economy would collapse by its own rules can be found” in an article written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger [in 1985], Tremonti said yesterday at Milan’s Cattolica University. —Bloomberg News, November 20, 2008

For the first time in the history of the world more people will die from overeating than undereating this year.

A better way to evaluate a company is to talk to the experts. No, I don’t mean journalists or analysts. I mean those who really know what’s going on and what the potential

When it comes to television advertising, Michael Bloomberg out-spends the NRA and all other self-defense groups by 6.3 to one. The money produces political attack ads that accuse supporters of right-to-carry on college campuses of “allowing criminals to carry hidden, loaded guns in our schools.

If you’re going to succeed, you need a vision, one that’s affordable, practical, and fills a customer need. Then, go for it. Don’t worry too much about the details. Don’t second-guess your creativity. Avoid overanalyzing the new project’s potential. Most importantly, don’t strategize about the long term too much.

Did I want to risk an embarrassing and costly failure? Absolutely. Happiness for me has always been the thrill of the unknown, trying something that everyone says can't be done, feeling that gnawing pit in my stomach that says "Danger ahead". Would it be nice not to have uncertainty, to sit back and "veg out"? When the phone rings constantly, when people keep demanding attention, when I desperately need time to myself, it seems an attractive notion just to "chuck it all". But then nobody calls, nobody stops by, and soon I'm nibbling my nails and getting irritable, and I realize that's not what I want. It sounds good. In reality though, I want action, I want challenge.

Stop and frisk does not get my vote.

One consequence, presumably unintended, of America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol has been the emergence of a not-quite-grassroots movement. In February 2005, Greg Nickels, the mayor of Seattle, began to circulate a set of principles that he called the “U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.” Within four months, more than a hundred and seventy mayors, representing some thirty-six million people, had signed on, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York; Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver; and Mayor Manuel Diaz of Miami. Signatories agreed to “strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities.” At around the same time, officials from New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine announced that they had reached a tentative agreement to freeze power plant emissions from their states at current levels and then begin to cut them. Even Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Hummer collector, joined in; an executive order he signed in June 2005 called on California to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 and to 1990 levels by 2020. “I say the debate is over,” Schwarzenegger declared right before signing the order.

Every morning when we get up, we relish the day’s upcoming battles. They keep us alive, and they keep Bloomberg’s corporate family thriving. We can’t wait for tomorrow. Who says we can’t do that? What do you mean they’ll beat us? Have them put on their boxing gloves, and send them into the ring. We’re ready!

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey.

Dr. Fauci’s business closures pulverized America’s middle class and engineered the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history. In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion.46 Some 493 individuals became new billionaires,47 and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line.48 The biggest winners were the robber barons—the very companies that were cheerleading Dr. Fauci’s lockdown and censoring his critics: Big Technology, Big Data, Big Telecom, Big Finance, Big Media behemoths (Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Viacom, and Disney), and Silicon Valley Internet titans like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Larry Ellison, and Jack Dorsey. The very Internet companies that snookered us all with the promise of democratizing communications made it impermissible for Americans to criticize their government or question the safety of pharmaceutical products; these companies propped up all official pronouncements while scrubbing all dissent. The same Tech/Data and Telecom robber barons, gorging themselves on the corpses of our obliterated middle class, rapidly transformed America’s once-proud democracy into a censorship and surveillance police state from which they profit at every turn.

Rather, the issue is whether it is right to have a mosque and Islamic center in virtually the exact spot where so many Americans were killed in the name of Islamic holy war. I don’t think it is right, any more than I would support the idea of a neo-Nazi recruiting center at Auschwitz. My sympathies in this case are not with religiously deprived Muslims, but rather with Debra Burlingame, a spokesperson for a 9/11 victims group. “Barack Obama has abandoned America at the place where America’s heart was broken nine years ago,” she said.5 Some supporters of the mosque, such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, clearly missed the distinction being made here between the right to worship and how and where that right is exercised. Fareed Zakaria, writer and CNN host, recognizes the distinction; even so, he argues in favor of the mosque on the grounds that the folks building it are traditional Muslims who have condemned terrorism.6 Still, it’s not clear why these moderate Muslims disregarded the sentiments of the 9/11 victims’ families and decided on a site so close to Ground Zero. Undoubtedly radical Muslims around the world will view the mosque as a kind of triumphal monument. There is historical precedent for this. Muslims have a long tradition of building monuments to commemorate triumphs over adversaries, as when they built the Dome of the Rock on the site of Solomon’s Temple, or when Mehmet the Conqueror rode his horse into the Byzantine church Hagia Sophia and declared that it would be turned into a mosque. Many Americans may not know this history, but the radical Muslims do, and Obama does as well. The radical Muslims would like the Ground Zero mosque built so it can stand as an enduring symbol of resistance to American power, and President Obama evidently agrees with them.

Yes, that’s the one. Aaron, I want you to acquire the company tomorrow. Start low, but I want you to end up offering at least fifteen million for it. Actually, how many partners are there?” “I see two registered partners. Michael Teo and Adrian Balakrishnan.” “Okay, bid thirty million.” “Charlie, you can’t be serious? The book value on that company is only—” “No, I’m dead serious,” Charlie cut in. “Start a fake bidding war between some of our subsidiaries if you have to. Now listen carefully. After the deal is done, I want you to vest Michael Teo, the founding partner, with class-A stock options, then I want you to bundle it with that Cupertino start-up we acquired last month and the software developer in Zhongguancun. Then, I want us to do an IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange next month.” “Next month?” “Yes, it has to happen very quickly. Put the word out on the street, let your contacts at Bloomberg TV know about it, hell, drop a hint to Henry Blodget if you think it will help drive up the share price. But at the end of the day I want those class-A stock options to be worth at least $250 million. Keep it off the books, and set up a shell corporation in Liechtenstein if you have to. Just make sure there are no links back to me. Never, ever.

The two of us have no interest in the tired old debate that is still playing out on Capitol Hill. Our interest is not in winning an argument or an election. It’s in saving lives, promoting prosperity, and stopping global warming.

Instead of arguing about making sacrifices, let’s talk about how we can make money. Instead of pitting the environment versus the economy, let’s consider market principles and economic growth. Instead of focusing on polar bears, let’s focus on asthmatic children. And instead of putting all hope in the federal government, let’s empower cities, regions, businesses, and citizens to accelerate the progress they are already making on their own.

the United States, the debate has too often centered on how likely various doom-and-gloom scenarios are, and when they’ll occur. But scaring people doesn’t work.

The reality is that the uncertainty involved means we do not know with precision whether we can achieve either of those goals; nor do we know for certain what the consequences will be if we do not. Regardless, most people put little faith in projections that far out, which is understandable. Scientists have been wrong plenty of times before. What people want to know is not exactly what will happen to the Earth eighty years from now but what will happen to their house, their job, and their community this year. Telling people that they might possibly save the Earth from distant and uncertain harm is not a great way to convince them to support a particular policy.

Defense, it is clear, is not enough. To find an answer, we decided to mount the most intensive consultation process in the club’s modern history, inviting over five thousand grassroots leaders to participate in a series of meetings, surveys, and discussions. It culminated in our first national convention, which we held in San Francisco in September 2005.

Even before the convention, the results from the state and local consultations suggested a surprising shift in the membership’s concerns—after more than a hundred years in which the protection of wild places was our highest priority, club leaders were now saying that climate change needed to be at the top of our agenda.

I didn’t know it yet, but this new priority would mean enormous changes in the way I saw the world and environmentalism. Previously environmentalists worked to stop bad things—pollution, clear-cutting, overfishing—but we more or less accepted the big-picture American economy, with the established industries that made it up. Not anymore. Now we were about to find ourselves in a different business: helping to foster a different kind of economic development, one based on knowledge and technology rather than fossil fuels. After thirty-five years of working to clean up after twentieth-century industrialism, environmentalists were about to plunge into creating its twenty-first-century replacement. But before we could go full tilt toward the new, we had to stop the last spasms of the old—an energy future crafted during George W. Bush’s first term by Vice President Cheney.

Here is how they came up with it: Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown organization set up a website pretending to sell guns, but no guns were sold. Criminal background checks were done on the people’s names for those who visited the site and people who might have criminal backgrounds were identified: however, there were all kinds of false positives. Someone might not have a criminal record, but someone else with a similar name might. And so the crusaders for gun control march on, with botched research, muddy numbers, and assumptions presented as facts.

vociferous

The great irony of 2008 was that our belief in a system of accounting, a belief woven so deeply inside our collective psyche that we’re not even aware of it, made us vulnerable to fraud. Even when done honestly, accounting is sometimes little more than an educated guess. Modern accounting, especially at the big, international banks, has become so convoluted that it is virtually useless. In a comprehensive dissection in 2014, the Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine explained how a bank’s balance sheet is almost impossibly opaque. The “value” of a large portion of the assets on that balance sheet, he noted, is simply based on guesses made by the bank about the collectability of the loans they make, or of the bonds they hold, and the prices that they might fetch on the market, all measured against the offsetting and equally fuzzy valuation of their liabilities and obligations. If a guess is off by even 1 percent, it can turn a quarterly profit into a loss. Guessing whether a bank is actually profitable is like a pop quiz. “I submit to you that there is no answer to the quiz,” he wrote. “It is not possible for a human to know whether Bank of America made money or lost money last quarter.” A bank’s balance sheet, he said, is essentially a series of “reasonable guesses about valuation.” Make the wrong guesses, as Lehman and other troubled banks did, and you end up out of business.

brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Cioffi and Tannin sought to prove that the two men had knowingly deceived their investors, overlooking the possibility that they simply had no idea what they were doing, and failed to grasp the real risk of a triple-A-rated subprime-backed CDO. The case was weak, and turned on a couple of e-mails obviously ripped from context. A member of the jury that voted to acquit the Bear Stearns subprime bond traders told Bloomberg News afterward not only that she thought they were innocent as charged but that she would happily

Most importantly, to successfully develop a serious business, you need a process, a practice, by which to obtain that information and, once obtained, a method with which to put that information to use in your business productively. —Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth

NEW YORK Climate change is likely to exact enormous costs on U.S. regional economies in the form of lost property, reduced industrial output and more deaths, according to a report backed by three men with vast business experience. The report, released Tuesday, is designed to persuade businesses to factor in the cost of climate change in their long-term decisions and to push for reductions in emissions blamed for heating the planet. It was commissioned by the Risky Business Project, which describes itself as nonpartisan and is chaired by former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Thomas F. Steyer, a former Bay Area hedge fund manager.

For my own job, my short list included Hillary, Colin Powell, Panetta, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

No, Michael Bloomberg. The face of gun control isn’t a wealthy PR executive from Monsanto that you lured into fronting an extremist [hate] group against law-abiding moms. The faces of gun control are rapists. Drug dealers. Gang members. Car jackers. Muggers. Abusers. By working to disarm women—and men—you’re encouraging them.

over the past decade Congress has not passed a single bill that takes direct aim at climate change. Yet at the same time, the United States has led the world in reducing emissions.

Matt Levine’s excellent forty-thousand-word article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Crypto Story.

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter asserted it clearly, in capital letters, in the headline of one of her nationally syndicated columns: They Gave Your Mortgage to a Less Qualified Minority. Another conservative columnist, Jeff Jacoby, wrote, “What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities? Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs.” By 2008, Jacoby was declaring the financial crisis “a no-win situation entirely of the government’s making.” When asked during the market panic on September 17 about the root causes of the crisis, billionaire and then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Georgetown University audience that the end of redlining was to blame. “It probably all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone….Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, ‘People in these neighborhoods are poor; they’re not going to be able to pay off their mortgages. Tell your salesmen don’t go into those areas,’ ” Bloomberg said.

350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.99

biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom's annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have."250–MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

It is unusual for those wielding plutocratic power in America to exercise it directly, according to Jeffrey Winters, the political scientist specializing in oligarchy. Direct rule by the superrich invites a dangerous amount of scrutiny. Those who have used their vast fortunes to secure public office in the United States, like Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, typically have made an effort not to appear to be ruling as oligarchs or for them. Pope clearly sensed the peril. He took care to say that he would waive the usual salary and only stay in office for a year. But questions about self-interest arose almost immediately. As North Carolina took a whiplash-inducing lurch in favor of the haves at the expense of the have-nots, it stirred a heated debate about the influence of big money in the state’s politics in general and about the motives and financial designs of Art Pope in particular.

the key questions are more important than ever: What is the problem? How valuable is the solution? Can we provide it profitably? Where will our competition come from? When I started out with computers, I believed what the manufacturers’ promotional materials promised. I grew into a skeptical, nontrusting cynic, but one who believes more than most in the potential technology has to improve our lives. What I learned on the journey was that we are all humans, and technology exists to serve us, not the reverse. The challenge is to resolve people issues, not software ones.

think big thoughts, even if his approval rating tanked. “Okay, it’s time to be controversial,” he said loudly.

Life sucks, not until Stalin, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughasvili, or J.F. Kennedy but ever since, Yellow Canary Cranberry!

Michael Bloomberg never fell for it—giving information away. He mixed other people’s information with proprietary data, added a layer of intelligence and—here’s the trick—made it scarce. It was expensive and had its own vertical distribution (storefronts) in the form of Bloomberg terminals. If you want breaking business news that might impact the price of a stock in your portfolio, you sign up with Bloomberg, get a terminal installed in your office, and soon the screen is rolling with an endless flow of news and financial data.

Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House.

Banks and venture capitalists can be the worst enemies of entrepreneurs. They create doubt in entrepreneurs’ minds, with their insistence on detailed game plans before they lend. They want five-year projections in a world that makes six-month forward planning difficult, even for stable and mature businesses, and they insist on “revenue budgeting” when no one knows what the new product will look like or who’ll buy how much. And worst of all, they think an originator will be helped by their oh-so-insightful views on how he or she should run the new business. Often, they kill off what’s different, special, and full of potential.

But it was still clear his calendar had too many empty hours.

Research and development conducted by private companies in the United States has grown enormously over the past four decades. We have substantially replaced the publicly funded science that drove our growth after World War II with private research efforts. Such private R&D has shown some impressive results, including high average returns for the corporate sector. However, despite their enormous impact, these private R&D investments are much too small from a broader perspective. This is not a criticism of any individuals; rather, it is simply a feature of the system. Private companies do not capture the spillovers that their R&D efforts create for other corporations, so private sector executives in established firms underinvest in invention. The venture capital industry, which provides admirable support to some start-ups, is focused on fast-impact industries, such as information technology, and not generally on longer-run and capital-intensive investments like clean energy or new cell and gene therapies. Leading entrepreneur-philanthropists get this. In recent years, there have been impressive investments in science funded by publicly minded individuals, including Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Meade Huntsman Sr., Eli and Edythe Broad, David H. Koch, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others (including numerous private foundations). The good news is that these people, with a wide variety of political views on other matters, share the assessment that science—including basic research—is of fundamental importance for the future of the United States. The less good news is that even the wealthiest people on the planet can barely move the needle relative to what the United States previously invested in science. America is, roughly speaking, a $20 trillion economy; 2 percent of our GDP is nearly $400 billion per year. Even the richest person in the world has a total stock of wealth of only around $100 billion—a mark broken in early 2018 by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in close pursuit. If the richest Americans put much of their wealth immediately into science, it would have some impact for a few years, but over the longer run, this would hardly move the needle. Publicly funded investment in research and development is the only “approach that could potentially return us to the days when technology-led growth lifted all boats. However, we should be careful. Private failure is not enough to justify government intervention. Just because the private sector is underinvesting does not necessarily imply that the government will make the right investments.

When I saw that screen light up that day in the Merrill Lynch offices, I lost any residual doubt that Bloomberg could make it. We had picked just the right project. It was big enough to be useful, small enough to be possible. Start with a small piece; fulfill one goal at a time, on time. Do it with all things in life. Sit down and learn to read one-syllable words. If you try to read Chaucer in elementary school, you’ll never accomplish anything. You can’t jump to the end game right away, in computers, politics, love, or any other aspect of life.

the CCP can influence senior politicians. This ‘corruption by proxy’, in which top leaders keep their hands clean while their family members exploit their association to make fortunes, has been perfected by the ‘red aristocracy’ in Beijing. In the crucial years 2014 and 2015, Beijing was aggressively expanding into the South China Sea while Obama, Kerry and Biden were sitting on their hands. The billionaire businessman and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was a late entrant in the contest to become the 2020 Democratic Party candidate for US president. He is the most Beijing-friendly of all aspirants. With extensive investments in China, he opposes the tariff war and often speaks up for the CCP regime.

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg understood this. “In medicine, or in science, [if] you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don’t have to go down that path again,” he said. “In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government.

Stonewalling requests from Congress to find details about what junk mortgages and other “toxic waste” the Federal Reserve was accepting in exchange for its swaps, Chairman Bernanke claimed that politicians had no right to know how the public purse was being put at risk. Bloomberg filed a Freedom of Information Act request, and nearly three years later, in July 2011, the Government Accountability Office provided Senator Bernie Sanders with a report detailing $16 trillion of Fed loans and swaps. It revealed how the officers of Wall Street’s leading banks who sat on the New York Federal Reserve Board gave their own firms the fortune of a century to tide them over. As