Bloomberg

Executive Summary

In August 1981, Salomon Brothers paid Michael Bloomberg $10 million to go away. With that severance he built a company that bankers now value at $80 billion or more, eight hundred times the $100 million valuation implied by the only outside investment it ever took, and the investor that wrote that check, Merrill Lynch, twice sold its stake back to raise cash, the second time two months before Merrill itself ceased to exist [1][3]. As arguments for getting fired go, business history offers nothing stronger.

The company itself is the strangest large business in capitalism. It is a private partnership that has raised no outside money since a $30 million check in the Reagan era; it sells a product whose interface looks like 1982 for $31,980 a year, and around 350,000 professionals pay, because the terminal is where the market's people talk to each other; it publishes other people's numbers all day while never publishing its own, and its estimated $15 billion of revenue pays its de facto dividend, several billion dollars a year, to a charitable foundation [2][3][1].

The story runs on refusals: no discounts, no unbundling, no IPO, no blind trust, no succession plan for four decades. Now the founder is 84, the chairman's seat has been empty since Mark Carney left to run Canada, and the endgame he has announced, leaving the company to his foundation, would force the one transaction he spent his life refusing [1][4]. Every era of this case asks the same question: what does it cost to keep a money machine entirely to yourself, and who inherits a machine built around one man's refusals?

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The Last Supper, 1966-1981