Nicolai Tangen: Hi everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund and today I'm in New York and I'm in the Bloomberg offices. Now, normally when I'm in the Bloomberg offices, I see a journalist or an anchor, but today I'm seeing the man himself, Michael Bloomberg.

Michael Bloomberg: I'm very careful to not be a journalist. [laughter] Um, the one thing you can't do is get involved in the journalism if you're going to have good journalism. So, there's one guy, John Micklethwait, who runs it.

Nicolai Tangen: Mike, uh, you just have one of the most extraordinary journeys in American business, starting uh, Bloomberg, being mayor for 12 years, being one of the most important philanthropists. And so perhaps we can just go all the way back the day that you...

Michael Bloomberg: I was born at an early age.

Nicolai Tangen: Oh yeah, you would [laughter] absolutely. Uh, no, let's start with Salomon Brothers because Bloomberg, you know, strangely enough, you were at some stage laid off and then the next day you started Bloomberg. So what do you what do you think then?

Michael Bloomberg: Um, I was, uh, grew up in Massachusetts. Father was a bookkeeper, made $6,000, the best year of his life. Uh, I was a boy scout. I, uh, was a C student. I always made the top half of the class possible is my gagline. And, um, when I was getting out of school, I went from college to business school at Harvard. I was lucky enough to get in. Uh but um when I was ready to graduate, I thought I was going to go to Vietnam partially. We were involved in that war. This was in 1966. A very nasty war in a very nasty ways. Americans treated the troops who we drafted and sent over to risk their lives. Some of them came back in boxes and some were lucky enough and didn't. But we were just treating people terribly. And so I signed up to go. I could get a commission as a second lieutenant in the army. I thought you'd be safer as a second lieutenant than as a private. Turns out not because the second lieutenants led the charge over the barb wire going out into the jungle and [snorts] a lot of them were killed. It turns out at the last minute, one month before graduation, I have perfectly flat feet and they didn't take anybody with flat feet. And so all of a sudden I wasn't going to go to Vietnam and had not thought at all about what I was going to do with my career.

Nicolai Tangen: Oh. And then you went into banking.

Michael Bloomberg: Um I asked a friend of mine, Steve Fenster, was very smart guy since unfortunately died of cancer. And Steve uh I said, "What should I do?" He said, "Go to Wall Street." I said, "Where is that? What do they do?" Said, "Just do it." I said, "Who do I call?" He said, "Call Solomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs." I said, "What's that? Who are they?" just do it. So I called both. One sent me down with an airplane ticket. One sent me down with a train ticket from Boston to New York. And uh both of them made me an offer. One offered $14,000 a year, the other $9,000 a year. I liked the people at the $9,000 one better, just who I happened to meet that day. [snorts] And I said to the head guy, "Look, here's my budget. $5 for Subway and newspapers and food, $125 for rent every month. I can't afford to go to work for you for $9,000. Um, we said, "How much do you need, kid?" And I did the math quickly and I split the difference. I said, "115." And he said, "Fine. $9,000 salary, $2500 loan." And he got up and he walked out of the room. And I didn't know if I had a job or not, but I assumed I did. And uh came in and uh month later when I finished school and then there was a bonus at the end of the fiscal year, September 30th, I got $500 bonus, forgiveness of the loan. The next year, I got a $2,000 bonus, forgiveness of the loan. Now, in the end, it worked out fine. Don't feel sorry for me. But I'll never forget that people make the mistakes of going to work for a place where they get paid the most. And that's not particularly when you're young. That's not what life's about. You've got to get experience. You've got to build friendships. You've got to try things and see what works and what doesn't.

Nicolai Tangen: And all these young people just looking at the wrong thing. What is my position? What am I going to be called? Do I have a title or what? when you're 25 years old and you're getting out of school, not where you should focus. No. But you took all the experience you had from Salmon and kind of put that into the the startup of uh Bloomberg. Now, how did you come up with the idea because it was quite revolutionary at the time.

Michael Bloomberg: I had worked on a trading desk and we had a couple of screens. The screen showed the prices of either stocks or bonds and it showed the last sale or the valuation and it showed uh plus or minus an arrow or a different color that but there was nothing on your desk that told you that let you do what you needed that data for. And people never didn't think about that. Well, why would I need the data? I want my draw a graph. I want to do a calculation. uh I want to send a message any of those kinds of things and um the computer could do it but nobody had put it together so I thought why don't we build a computer to do it now keep keep in mind when I was doing this PCs have not been invented then nobody believes that there was there was a date before Apple and they didn't uh we wanted I wanted to have a computer but they didn't exist So I hired an engineer, Ron Harris, nice, very smart guy, and I would go up on Saturdays and work in his barn. He had a little lab set up, and I'd solder in the compa capacitors and resistors and the circuit boards, and we made our own computers. Now, fast forward till two years later when PCs were invented, and they said, "We're getting out of the PC business. That's not what we do well. that's not we could couldn't possibly compete in here and so we just bought some p the first few of the first PCs and junk the other stuff and the rest is history.

Nicolai Tangen: Now uh if you come into our offices in New York you will see uh Bloomberg screens all over the place. Why have you been so successful? Why has Bloomberg been so successful?

Michael Bloomberg: I think we focused on doing building something that was useful. Um, didn't try to make it into something that it wasn't. Um, there was a need. Nobody really thought that having that computer in the middle that I just described uh was useful. And by the time it was done, which was 3 years before we really had a customer, um it was too late for anybody to catch up. Now, since then, there are plenty of people who have good products, but they only do one or two of the 10 20 things that we do. And the real world is you've got to have lots of different inputs and be able to adjust to different kinds of customers and different markets and that sort of thing. and we just focused on building the best thing we could and not necessarily always ask uh listening to what the customers want. Um I've always asked and customers can be very valuable but that doesn't mean they are able to think in the terms of what we could do with a computer for example.

Nicolai Tangen: So so what what are some of the things you put into the computer which which they didn't know that they needed?

Michael Bloomberg: You put in the terms of in the case of a bond the maturity date and maybe a call date but at the beginning it wasn't even that and a coupon and uh and and today's date and then there's a formula you can use to calculate the price of that the security at a given yield or vice versa. Um uh we uh uh just kept adding functionality, didn't increase the price. Um kept uh uh going and sitting with people and asking them what they wanted and watching them try to use what we had. I'll never forget there's a it's a good story. There's a Glenn Walner, one of our employees, really smart, tall, nice guy. um he was going to give a demonstration to somebody like you who headed a big organization and asked me to come along. Fine, like to do so. Um we get there and in those days we were still using the Bloomberg built hardware. So he brings in this box with a rate cathode ray tube in it, the the picture thing. And then there was one that had the computer in it. And there was one that had the keyboard in it and one that had the power supply in it. And he plugs in all these wires. And everybody's sitting around watching him doing this. And then he turns to me and he says, "Darn it, I forgot the power cord. I just wanted to take a swing at him." After all of this, we finally got an introduction to this bank. I forget who it was and he was going to blow it because he didn't don't worry about it at all. I've got my openness briefcase and he took out he had printed out copies of every single screen that we produced and could show it to them and everybody had a good laugh about it. They bought in they ordered a couple computers or two or three maybe not more uh right then and there. But the point of the story is it's that kind of preparation, that kind of willingness to keep going and not to let little things get in the way.

Nicolai Tangen: And in your book, um, you talk about the important cultural aspects and one of them is to outwork other people. And this is an example of that, right? What does it mean in practice to outwork other people?

Michael Bloomberg: Well, you don't say no. You don't give up. Um, you put a balance in life. you still want to be able to go out and, you know, have a life, a family. Uh so it it's balancing hard work with enough um time off to not get worn out or that sort of thing.

Nicolai Tangen: But you are So when are you now? You are now 83, right?

Michael Bloomberg: 83 and happy to be at my ambition is to be 84.

Nicolai Tangen: Are you still in the office?

Michael Bloomberg: Uh, most days I've been taking some Fridays off, which is a little bit embarrassing, but yes, fundamentally I like to come in.

Nicolai Tangen: When are you here in the morning?

Michael Bloomberg: I get up at 5:15 automatically. If I didn't even set the alarm, I probably would. Girlfriend and I both get up. Uh, I take a shower, do some exercises with a trainer a couple times a week, and then go to work, and I'm here by 7 at the latest, maybe a little bit earlier.

Nicolai Tangen: Is this the kind of work ethic which everybody in Bloomberg has?

Michael Bloomberg: an awful lot do. People here, we have very low attrition rate. Uh, people here like to be here. Um, at least they tell me they do and I think it looks to me like they do. And when I go to visit a customer, I'll always take along a few salesmen or maybe an engineer or two and I will say I am just impressed with how welltrained they are and how focused they are in a nice ways.

Nicolai Tangen: You also talk about the importance of taking risks and encouraging people to take risks. What type of

Michael Bloomberg: Well, you have to try things. Um, you know, it's a stupid idea, but maybe it might work. Now, you can't do all the stupid ideas and not all of them will work. But just because it's not conventional doesn't mean you shouldn't take the shot and do it. Um, uh, when somebody comes to me and they want to try something, we'll try it. I don't can't believe it's going to work. And I try to ask questions and show explain to me what's going on. But um if they have a gut feeling that that they can that it's going to work, you want to encourage them. Even if I'm right and it doesn't work, if you try something here and it doesn't work, you can go back and I'll make sure that you and I are seen walking together telling a joke to each other. I want people to understand it's not you don't have a penalty if things don't work. Quite the contrary, the fact that you tried is a plus and that's going to help your career.

Nicolai Tangen: Some people put uh their offices in cheap places to save money whilst you put them in the most expensive places and and you make great offices.

Michael Bloomberg: Well, it's fascinating. I read in the paper every day, another company is going to use AI to get rid of the people who aren't paid very much, who deal with their customers. Last time I checked, the really important group was your customers, and you don't want to pull away from giving as much service to them as you can. Uh, same thing with the loca with the physical location. I want you to come into the office and that sort of thing. I'll never forget the first time we opened an office in Tokyo. We hired one guy and I was there at the time and he couldn't start until his parents came to see the office and approve it. Now, it was a dumpy little thing in a hotel in a an office building or something and long since lost the name, but um I I'm a believer that you want to have people like what they're doing, be proud of what they're doing. Um the most important asset this company has is its employees. So for that reason, you certainly want to provide as good facilities as you can. Now, you don't have to go crazy, but you can find things to make people proud of where they work. Um that they can bring their friends in and some envy saying, "Look, this is what we're we're different." Um, and [clears throat] it's, you know, I've been doing it for 44 years with the exception of 12 years I went to city hall in the middle. And, uh, we've I've always tried to get the best facilities. One of our employees yesterday was in a head-on collision with a drunken driver. Uh, seven broken bones, she said. Um, and I called her this morning in the hospital. her husband was there, expressed my condolences, assured them that our insurance policy, you can't spend more on insurance than we do. It covers everything. Um, and they shouldn't worry about that. They, of course, our HR department had already contacted, been over, and they know how to take care of people. But we have 26,000 employees. Yeah. But so you got 26,000 people and you call somebody who's in an accident. Uh if you have 26,000 people, you're probably going to have somebody that either they or their spouse or their ch child is injured or dies every week. And those calls I always make. Sometimes I have to have a translator on the phone because they I don't happen to speak whatever the language they do. It just says to everybody that I consider and the management considers and your co-workers consider that you're valuable and that you're a nice person and that we're in this together and uh we're going to have success together.

Nicolai Tangen: What are some of the other leadership principles that you have?

Michael Bloomberg: You certainly take care of your people. You give them a chance to have upward mobility. Um, you know, I'd talk to you and I'd say, uh, you say, you know, you're happy where you are. Great. Uh, you say, you know, but you'd like to move. Okay. Do a good job here and that'll be the end of the road. And they're not going to guarantee you when, but you've got to do the job now. Um, and I always say to them when I say who built that, [clears throat] don't say me, say I or whatever. Say, um, oh, uh, he did it. I was lucky enough to help him. Now, everybody knows you're lying, but two things. One, they think better of you because you've given credit elsewhere. And number two, that other guy or woman owes you something now, [laughter] so you'll get it'll come around. But I just I think it's treating people as human beings and understanding what they that they have aspirations as well and they have fears and

Nicolai Tangen: Why did you decide to run for mayor?

Michael Bloomberg: I think it somebody asked me that recently and I think it is I was really annoyed that you kept reading that you couldn't do anything about education and the kids were getting short the it was the teachers unions really that which I understand the teachers union they're to defend not the students they're there to they are there to defend the teachers and I understand that but somebody's got to stand up for the kids and the elected officials tend not to because the teachers unions are very good at establishing contacts and making the the the elected officials think that the teachers union has a great deal of say in their reelection which is what they really care about. So um I we the the test scores were going down and everybody said you couldn't do anything about it and I thought to myself that's not that's not true. I think you could do something about it. And out of that, I decided I'd run. Everybody thought I was crazy. Nobody thought I had a chance. Um, it was the luck of the drawer at that point in time. You had the right opponent who wasn't very u much of a candidate or whatever, but uh and and you just got lucky and got elected. So during those 12 years, the average living age in New York increased by three years.

Nicolai Tangen: What's the main difference of difference between running a company and running a city?

Michael Bloomberg: I think most of the principles are pretty much the same. um you uh cannot be as uh free to do anything you want if you're the you can do it if you're the owner. You have to understand you're not the owner in the case of uh the dealing with the public. But the public if you explain to them what the problem is and how you're going to fix it and you put your career on the line for them and then build credibility as things work. Um, it's amazing how you can change things. I convinced the teachers union to go along with us and lengthen the school day and that sort of thing. Wasn't easy and it was very expensive because they wanted to have their salaries grossed up for it. But we went and we got we sent a social worker and a and a police officer to that person sleeping on the doorstep. convinced them to come in and we'll give them a shower, give them some clothing, um give them a bed to sleep in and then take them home because an awful lot of the homeless have left home and they don't in an argument and they don't know how to get back in and I think there's solutions like that um testing and we showed that test scores would go up. There was a gap between black and Latino kids here and white and Asian kids here. And nobody could get rid of that gap. It stayed the same. Went up and down a little bit based on other things. We cut the gap in half. And it wasn't by bringing the top down. It was by bringing the bottom up.

Nicolai Tangen: And could we have done more after 12 years? Maybe. I don't know. Um, but it brings us to your commitment [clears throat] to philanthropy. Where where did that come from? because you have now given away more than 20 billion.

Michael Bloomberg: I remember my father we we talked about philanthropy around the dinner table when that that rotation of who was going to do the talking at my house that I talked about. Um my mother collected money for an organization had which helped people in Israel and I I cut lawns for the Boy Scouts to raise money for them. uh sold Christmas wreaths for for them. Um shoveled snow for them. Finally, after a number of bad starts, I realized you got to put know which way the plow's coming and put the snow on the upside, not the [laughter] plow back in. Um but I think it was at home. We talked about charity certainly. And then, you know, I'm in an enviable position. I I don't need another set of golf clubs, but I do want to have the satisfaction of maybe saving somebody's life or uh helping a kid get an education or curing a disease or uh that's heady stuff. If you sit there and you before you close your eyes and go to bed, it's like, you know, aren't very many people have done those things and I'd like to do it. Um [snorts] I've taken care of my children. They are both very philanthropic. They both have charities of their own they've started because of my former wife who's still one of my best friends and I talked about it all the time. Um they give away part of their own money uh every year.

Nicolai Tangen: How do you decide on where to allocate the money, who to give to?

Michael Bloomberg: A little bit of it is who asks you or brings the need to your attention. So I have a number of friends here who give away enormous quantities of their their own money and when they call and say I'm supporting this. we're going to try to or Bill Gates for example, I want to we can end polio it if it would be amazing if you could do it and he was making progress and he needed some help and so be happy to do something with them and I don't know we gave $100 million and another $100 million. Um we still there's still polio in a couple of countries and it's why do they do it? because Gates can explain what he's doing and it's a good idea and when I have want to do something that I think is a good idea, I'll call him and he'd be happy to help in the same ways and I have a number of friends like that. But um they just have this belief that you can make the world a better place because I at least in my case I get pleasure out of it. I mean, it's really nice to be able to Yeah. And I don't go around bragging to to people about it. I just uh it's nice to be able to say I did something. There's a woman who's been with me for 30 years, Patty Harris. She runs the foundation and uh we Alli Jaffen with her and there's about 350 people there because when we make a gift, we follow up and make sure you do what you promised. And I just in fact bought another building just down the street because we're going to run out of space where we are now. Uh but it's sitting with them and we talk about, you know, should we do this, should we do that? Uh what's the likelihood of them succeeding? Is it well-run? Uh you they may be a great idea, but if they have absolutely no clue how to make it, you can give them some help. and and we do help a lot of people uh who who are giving away money by training them and uh for example we work against uh uh guns, illegal guns. Uh John Feinblad runs it and they've made a big difference passing laws that um require you to have a permit or don't sell to minors or things like that. And and this I'm not opposed to the the the right to have a gun, but letting kids have guns is absolutely outrage. And also, if you have a gun in your household, your gun, and you hide it away all the time, you're 20 times as likely to get killed by that gun than if if the gun wasn't there. Oh, wow. And it's because the kids, you know what kids will do? you'd look in your mother's pocketbook and you'd look what's on the top shelf up there and that sort of stuff. Um, and with with Patty and Ally, we go over and then we have Anthther Williams works on the environmental stuff and we just paid for a new satellite up there to look for methane. Methane is worse than coal even. You can now, however, see it come out of the ground. Typically, it's when they're drilling for oil. And then we'll call up and say, you know, look, you can sell that methane and get make money out of it. Uh, and you most of them I didn't realize that and they want to go along. We've closed over half of the coal fired power plants in Europe and I think it's about 75% of the coal fired power plants in America and um so it's been very successful. We have a long ways to go. Yes. and the the planet is warming at an a a rate that is going to be cataclysmic for everybody. But you can sit around and say, "Well, I just throw my hands up. I can't do anything." No, we're going to keep working and and see what we can do.

Nicolai Tangen: You mentioned your shelf, and I appreciate you haven't got a gun on your shelf, but you have some Spanish books on your shelves. You are a diehard believer in lifelong learning, and you are the best example I can think of. So, how do you how do you continue to learn?

Michael Bloomberg: Well, I mean on this morning I was uh studying irregular verbs um in Spanish and if you said to me should you spend your time learning to a foreign language, I can tell you Apple now has earplugs that will translate for you and that's the software is in the phone but whatever and um you know so you can talk to anybody in any language.

Nicolai Tangen: So why do you then try to learn irregular verbs?

Michael Bloomberg: I'm not an athlete. I come from a family where sports was never mentioned in the house. Um and so I picked up a sport, picked up golf because it's something you can do on your own and I needed some intellectual thing. And so I was I got a D in French and I went to school at when I went to college there was a German requirement. This was in 1960. Why German? Because nobody had translated the science during World War II. And so I thought uh there was a requirement to to to learn to speak German. Three days in German class, I changed the engineering school. I was never going to learn German, but that was something I always I failed at it or didn't have the guts to go along with it. And so why not try it, you know?

Nicolai Tangen: Mike, what do you want uh your legacy to be?

Michael Bloomberg: um that for example John's Hopkins my alma mater is one of the great universities in the country and they do enormous amount of research and help enormous amount of people get educated and save their lives and culture and all that sort of stuff and I want to make sure that people go back and say you know he really was uh a competent a guy who cared about other people and then did something about it. I don't think they're going to remember me as a great golfer. It's the rid most ridiculous thing I do and I'm obsessed with it. So why don't [laughter] but I'd like to think and I think also my kids like I my parents made a very big difference in my life. Um Museum of Science in Boston made a very big difference in my life. The Boy Scouts made a very big difference in my life. Uh, and I'd like to uh say thank you to those organizations. So, I support the Boy Scouts. I also support the museum.

Nicolai Tangen: Well, you for sure care about people and you've done more about it than anybody else I know. I mean, what an incredible what an incredible what an incredible act.

Michael Bloomberg: Thank you very much. But you can do it, too. just everybody can do it at a different scale [music] and to you know you volunteer and go in and help and uh [clears throat] put the food in for deliveries for free food and there's things you can do and it it's just so satisfying. I don't understand why people don't do it.