Mayor Mogul Mike Bloomberg wants to be New York City's CEO. Too bad he's only mayor.
By Mark Gimein Reporter Associates Doris Burke, Elias Rodriguez, Noshua Watson

(FORTUNE Magazine) – He sits at half a desk in a room filled with desks, the desks crowded with crisp white shirts, the white shirts stuffed with senior officials, all of them chattering and clattering and on occasion glancing up, just ever so slightly, to steal a glance at the flickering numbers on the Bloomberg terminal at their left or right. It is an extraordinary sight. Not the mayor, or not only the mayor, but the room and everything it represents. Its cream-colored paint is chipped, its windows blackened with dirt, but the ceilings soar to 30 feet or more, a great, ornate 19th-century hall for the machinery of government, its height shaming the four-foot-tall dividers clinging to its bottom. There is nothing like it anywhere--rows and rows of deputy mayors and special assistants and special advisors, some of the most powerful bureaucrats in the world. It is like a television fantasy of politics, all the characters gathered in one room, the highest officials of the city trying not to trip over one another, everybody feeling ever so slightly the pull of the man himself like dancers swirling around the prima ballerina.

The added kick is that he is a billionaire. The second-richest man to hold public office in a democracy today (Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, is the first). Do you spell that with a capital "B"? Billionaire. Mayor of the City of New York and a billionaire, and he doesn't even sit in his own office--the one with Fiorello La Guardia's gilt-edged desk--but mixes it up with the troops out on the floor. It's a habit he picked up 25 years ago at the old Salomon Brothers brokerage and has always stuck to. At the eponymous company he owns but now, having assumed office, no longer runs (see box, "The Other Bloomberg"), his desk still stands, exposed, in the corner of a television studio. The open office is a dramatic gesture, infinitely more effective than riding the subway to City Hall (which other New York City mayors have also done but quickly abandoned). It says the mayor is one of us, works as hard as us, clocks in at the office like us. It says so not just to the city at large but also to his own staff. The bullpen is to the mayor a matter not only of convenience but of conviction as well. "If you put up barriers," the mayor says, "physical barriers, people assume nefarious deeds are taking place on the other side.... If you don't have the barrier, [your employees think] yeah, you look like a decent guy."

In a political milieu in which, especially since Sept. 11, politicians desperately seek to avoid the taint of politics, the bullpen is a welcome relief. It replaces the picture of the closed door, cigar smoke billowing out underneath, with the buzzy efficiency of the high-tech office. It says that the mayor is not a traditional politico and also that he is not one of those Mr. Burns-type billionaires but a transparent, open, accessible billionaire. In a world of truck-driving, ordinary-Joe billionaires, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, the mayor without an office, out-ordinary-Joes them all. He is guileless, forthright, direct. What you see is what you get. And with Bloomberg, the bullpen seems to declare, you see it all.

"You've got to understand," the mayor says (not so much sitting as lying on the couch in his office, the one now used only for formal interviews and photo sessions), "my whole business life has been out in the open."

Sept. 11 and a pile of money were the two things that got Michael Bloomberg elected. The terrorist attacks set the stage for a shortened election and an all-powerful endorsement from outgoing mayor Rudolph Giuliani, whose influence after his amazing post-Sept. 11 performance was almost divine. The money sealed the deal. Bloomberg had planned to spend no more than $30 million on his mayoral race; "at some point you start to look obscene," he told New York magazine. In the event, however, he spent at least $72 million.

Bill Cunningham, the mayor's communication director and close aide, says that when Bloomberg was running, the conventional wisdom was that a billionaire could not win. That is not quite true. The conventional wisdom was that a Republican would not win the race, that a political neophyte could not win a mayor's race, and that Bloomberg in particular would not win the election. But while his inexperience was seen as an obstacle, the very fact that Bloomberg was a billionaire was not. It actually made him more attractive to the voters.

For one thing, Bloomberg's campaign cleverly made his wealth an asset, effectively presenting the candidate as a man immune to the demands of special interests. That created a perception that New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine (himself a centimillionaire former Wall Streeter who knows a thing or two about spending a lot of money to get elected) calls "unbought-unbossed."

For another, there is every reason to think that the allure of the self-made billionaire is itself a draw to voters, as it is to everyone else from journalists to party planners. Bloomberg claims to resent being identified first and foremost as a billionaire ("You put 'billionaire' before my name. Why don't you put 'father'?"--as if). He insists that the voters simply didn't care, but in fact there's something about the Big B that just makes people go gaga. Arthur Levitt, former SEC chairman, and a member of Bloomberg LP's advisory board, describes the man in a striking explosion of superlatives: "Bloomberg is the most interesting person I've ever known in my life. He's impulsive, he's intuitive, he's compassionate. He's the most creative person I've ever known. Am I describing some kind of demigod?" All this from a man who knows Bloomberg mostly from playing golf and discussing securities regulation.

The end result was that New York's voters, whatever their motives, did elect the political neophyte (not to mention, thanks to new term limits, 38 new and untested members in a 51-seat city council). Bloomberg is unused to the basic rituals of public life like asking Washington for money. And now he has taken on what might be the toughest job in the political world. For the past few months New York's economy has been in awful shape. The city has lost 126,000 jobs in a year, 94,000 as a direct result of Sept. 11. Tax collections will be down $2.05 billion over two years because of the attacks alone. Businesses across lower Manhattan are reeling, and it looks as if things will get worse for a while--most of the companies that had been in the World Trade Center are scrounging for real estate outside the city. It is a difficult time to test the theory that the business of government is better off in the hands of businessmen than of professional politicians.

In New York you still cannot get away from Sept. 11. "Do you know what that is?" the mayor asks as he rides in the back seat of his hulking black Chevy Tahoe along the East Side of Manhattan. "Refrigerator trailer trucks. Body parts. That's where the DNA matching is."

That's how it is, even six months later. Body parts. The mayor is a resident of New York, like everyone else here. He is aware that though ground zero might now be outfitted with an observation platform for mourners and gawkers, ultimately it is still a big, painful hole in the ground. But unlike Giuliani, whose heart soared in the tempest, Bloomberg lacks the reflective drive. Sept. 11 got Bloomberg elected, and it is Sept. 11 that will, no less than it defined Giuliani, define his own tenure. But where so many other New Yorkers see Sept. 11 in epochal terms--you might even say that they remain intimate with those tragic hours--Bloomberg does not. "I think of myself as a practical person. I look at life as, 'Okay, what's the next problem? Let's go address that.' I don't sit back and try to, even in my own mind, create this 'vision' of what I'm going to have to address. I think a lot of that stuff is what liberal arts majors do. Engineers [Bloomberg holds a degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins] look at the next problem."

To Bloomberg, it is all a colossal management challenge. Thanks to the effects of Sept. 11, added to the Wall Street slide and the generally troubled economy, New York City faces a $4.8 billion budget deficit in the next year. Fine. Bloomberg can handle that. He has talked to Felix Rohatyn, the banker who helped rescue New York from its last big fiscal crisis, way back in 1975. He has proposed cuts across the board, hitting every city agency. He has asked the state to restore the "commuter tax" on people who work but don't live in the city. This is all doable. He has experts on it, people like Marc Shaw, the deputy mayor for operations and Bloomberg's chief budget negotiator. He wants more power over New York's schools. This is all management. He is good at it. He is not only a pragmatist but at times an eloquent defender of pragmatism. It all comes down to "the facts." "The facts are the facts," Bloomberg says. "I've always been fascinated by, though never understood, people who are unwilling to face the facts and put them out there."

Bloomberg wants to be applauded as a master manager, a doer. He devotes a chapter of his autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, to "Management 101." He lights up when he talks about it. In early March, for instance, he spoke to an association of New York technology companies. He told them a story about once seeing a line forming at the Bloomberg LP reception desk. He went around the desk to see what the problem was. It turned out the software was crummy; the receptionist could barely read the small text and had to type in several lines of useless information for each visitor. So Bloomberg went upstairs to get the programmer and made him sit at the receptionist's desk for two days. "By Friday," Bloomberg snaps out the punch line, "we had a new program."

The crowd applauds. It is the story of an effective manager. It is also the story of a bully. (Would he have had his new program so soon if he hadn't sentenced the programmer to a two-day stint at the desk?) The story cuts both ways. To Bloomberg it reveals his skills as a manager. But what does it reveal about him as a person?

One of the first political lessons that Bloomberg seems to be taking away is a newfound dislike of the press. The press loved Bloomberg as a businessman, and Bloomberg seems to have loved the press. He still has a soft spot for the business press, which for a long time has treated him well (and he can be very collegial with some reporters, like WNBC's Gabe Pressman). But the political press is a different story. Says Bloomberg: "The business press, generally speaking, tries to write the story, and they will ask you, Did you mean this or did you mean that, and then, when you clarify, they'll write what you said in the clarification. The political press would write, He said A first and then said B and flip-flopped. It is a different attitude. What you say and how you say it. How you say it matters more to the political press."

Riding toward Queens, Bloomberg tells a story about his inauguration. Apparently the crush of photographers was so bad that a 75-year-old guy got knocked to the ground and broke his pelvis. "I went to visit him in the hospital, I felt so bad," Bloomberg says. "The press didn't care." His own press secretary, Ed Skyler, says the press did write about it and quoted him. "You said, 'The press broke his pelvis.'"

The mayor starts to protest. "Yes, you did," his spokesman insists. "You said, 'The press. Broke. His pelvis.'" Of course, it's not really about the photographers. They're just a symbol. The real problem is that the press is not interested in management. It is interested in Bloomberg. It is interested in the vision thing, and the character thing, and the symbol thing. Bloomberg is a very busy man. Nonetheless, if he happens to skip the funerals of firefighters (as he did after he took office), it is Page One material. And there's the character thing--what you say reveals ideas, how you say it reveals character. And there's the other character thing, like the sexual harassment suit in which Bloomberg was accused of telling a subordinate who got pregnant to "Kill it." (Bloomberg denies having said that, as well as a number of other demeaning and more frankly sexual remarks featured in the lawsuit.)

"It was very hard to tell him that when he became a candidate, the press would eat him up," says Cunningham of the campaign. "All the speculation [about whether he'd run] didn't show him that the press would be looking to see the stumbles." Bloomberg cannot understand why these questions get asked over and over again. According to former FORTUNE reporter Alan Deutschman, Bloomberg, whom he'd never met before, started their lunch a decade ago with a crude remark about the anatomy of a well-known financier's wife. "You keep whipping this dead horse!" Bloomberg (who also says he does not remember making the remark) spit back when asked about this recently. "I don't understand what you want me to say. You want me to tell you an off-color joke?"

One of the more troubling aspects of Bloomberg is that he seems to exist inside a force field in which the facts are just a little bit better than they are and more like what he wants them to be. He occasionally burnishes them, and one suspects it is because he is simply not used to anyone calling him on it. When he talks about his book, Bloomberg insists that he "wrote every word of that book," even though Bloomberg News editor Matthew Winkler's name is on the cover and Bloomberg's own afterword speaks of combining "Matt's scribblings" and his own. Then when he brags about New York City's low crime rate, he goes a bit too far and suggests that it's lower than that of suburban Nassau and Westchester counties.

The cycle of accusation and counteraccusation has clearly taken its toll on a man who, acquaintances say, is in any case not given to self-revelation--a useful quality in a business leader but not in a politician, who must reveal little but look as if he is revealing a lot. Despite having lived so much of his business life "out in the open"--or possibly because of it--Bloomberg is by no means an open man. He grew up in Medford, Mass., and while he is Jewish, his mode of engagement is more New England than New York Italian-Jewish-Hispanic liveliness. When he tells jokes, he does not crack a smile but snaps them out like little rifle shots. His natural reticence seems to make the whole process of dealing with the press and the public even more difficult.

Having run his own business for 20 years--a business where, by the way, virtually all the employees eat lunch at their desks and clock in and out with electronic badges--Bloomberg now finds himself exposed to a level of scrutiny with which he is unfamiliar.

It is hard to imagine a politician less interested in politics than Bloomberg. "I'm not a political guy. Nobody believed me about that when we were running the campaign. I've never watched any [election campaign] television debates, I've never had a great interest in politics. The challenge of making life better for people, that's not politics so much as government."

He admires the vision thing--in other people. Before he ran for office, Bloomberg discussed social questions with Henry Kissinger, with whom he is extremely impressed. "Whether you loved him or hated him," Bloomberg says, "Henry Kissinger was a Nobel Prize-winner. Hard to argue he wasn't successful in government." But it is very clear that he is impressed with Kissinger precisely because Kissinger's approach is so drastically different from his own. "He's one of these conceptual people," Bloomberg notes, implying that he himself is not. "I don't want to go and win the ideological war. I want to make the school system better; I don't think we should raise taxes. I'm not sure where my 'ideology' is, but I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it."

In some ways the absence of "ideology" seems a welcome relief after the Giuliani administration, which prior to Sept. 11 was not exactly known for collegial accommodation. A Democrat until switching parties not long before the election, Bloomberg has reached out to minority leaders and included in his staff veterans of both the Giuliani mayoralty and previous Democratic administrations. His finance commissioner, Martha Stark, for instance, served in the liberal Dinkins administration. Still, this political pragmatism leaves many in government perplexed. "If I were to categorize him, I would say he is more of an implementer," says a newly elected city councilman, James Sanders Jr. "I'm a little curious about what is the play we're implementing."

Two months into Bloomberg's tenure, the New York Times ran a story under the headline bloomberg is content to avoid spotlight. The story said, in essence, that there was little news coming out of the mayor's office. Strangely little news coming out of the mayor's office. The mayor's advisors, some quoted by name and others anonymously, spun this absence of...well, spin, as a positive development. "Nothing this guy has done so far has an eye toward four years from now," one unnamed aide said. The Times explained this as a tendency to work behind the scenes rather than in the public eye (though the writer also quoted a puzzled lobbyist who pointed out that Bloomberg wasn't exactly picking up the phone to make his views clear behind the scenes, either).

In his very first days in office, Bloomberg did one thing that caught virtually all observers by surprise and seemed to signal a real rupture in the political fabric. No sooner had he taken office than he squelched an extremely generous stadium deal that just days earlier Giuliani had promised to the Yankees and Mets. It was a politically striking act because, after all, Giuliani might be the only politician to whom Bloomberg really owes anything. As a gesture of political independence, it falls right in the line of Fiorello La Guardia's maxim that his first qualification for office was his "monumental ingratitude" to all the people who supported him (a maxim that Bloomberg knows and regards highly).

Since then, however, the Bloomberg agenda has consisted of essentially two points. The first is that New York needs to cut a little from each agency to come up with a workable budget. The second is that the mayor should have more control over New York's extremely powerful board of education. On the first of these issues, Bloomberg's staff has come up with a budget whose most distinctively "Bloombergian" feature might be a proposal to raise cigarette taxes dramatically (Bloomberg himself quit cold turkey and detests cigarettes). The second item on the agenda is somewhat controversial, but the truth is that it is by no means new--every New York mayor in memory has asked for this, and none has gotten it.

The funny thing is that Bloomberg's one early dramatic act and long period of relative silence are actually two facets of the same outlook, which comes down to this: The billionaire mayor does not like politics. He does not seem to like horse trading, nor does he like strutting his stuff for the crowd. Which is kind of a natural attitude for a billionaire mogul. But a strange one for a politician.

A few years ago Bloomberg took up golf, but to his chagrin, he is still not very good. "Golf totally consumes him," says his longtime friend Morris Offit, and when Bloomberg disappeared from view for a weekend, leaving the tabloids in a tizzy of speculative fervor, it was not for, say, a romantic weekend with his current flame (Bloomberg is divorced) but for a short golf vacation. The fact that he is not (yet) a spectacular golfer does not just annoy Bloomberg but actually confuses him. "He thinks," says Offit, "that there should be something mechanical about golf. He is just beginning to realize that he can't control his body that precisely. There's a randomness to golf."

You might say there's the same randomness to politics. The Harvard Business School might teach you something about business (even if not everything), but Harvard's Kennedy School of Government won't teach you anything about how to be a politician. There are no fixed rules, and it's all about the intangibles. "Do I think I'll be a good politician?" Bloomberg asks. "I think I'll be the best politician you've ever seen. You have to have that kind of confidence." He's right about the confidence, of course. But does he want to be a politician, or a manager?

"There's nothing more emotional than a political campaign. It's the last place where you walk into an arena and have your body exposed to getting the thumbs down," says political consultant David Garth, who was at Bloomberg's side for much of the campaign. "I thought, Either this guy is the coolest guy in the world, or he is totally unaware of what's happening."

Now that he's mayor, Bloomberg is still much the same way. He doesn't seem to realize that he's in a gladiatorial arena. Politicians are more or less paid to live out in the open, and that is the part that might not come so easily to Bloomberg and those who follow in his well-financed footsteps. Because while Bloomberg believes that he has spent his whole life living in the open, really, as anyone who has ever worked in an open office will tell you, it feels a lot more open if you don't happen to be the boss.

REPORTER ASSOCIATES Doris Burke, Elias Rodriguez, Noshua Watson

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