10/04/2026
They handed me a $10 million severance check and fired me on a Tuesday in 1981.
I was 39 years old. Fifteen years at Salomon Brothers — building their entire computer system from scratch — and suddenly I was out the door.
Most people would have been crushed. I saw an opening.
My name is Michael Bloomberg. I grew up in a modest house in Medford, Massachusetts. My father kept books for a small dairy company and never made more than $6,000 a year. Every night at dinner my mother set the table with the good silverware. We talked about our days. We talked about giving back. Those dinners taught me more than any classroom ever could.
After I got fired I rented a one-room office, hired four programmers, and built the Bloomberg Terminal — a system that delivered real-time financial data, news, and analytics to traders who desperately needed it.
It took off.
Today Bloomberg LP operates in over 100 countries. I still own the majority. But money was never the end goal.
What my parents taught me at that dinner table never left me.
So I started giving it away — while I’m still alive to see it matter.
Over $25 billion so far. More than $4.5 billion to Johns Hopkins alone, including $1 billion to make medical school tuition-free for most students. Hundreds of millions to historically Black medical schools. Over a billion dollars fighting to***co worldwide. Billions more for climate action, education, and public health.
I didn’t wait until after I was gone. I didn’t build monuments to my name. I just decided that wealth, once you’ve built it, should be used to create a better world for the children who come after you.
They fired me at 39.
I turned that pink slip into something that changed how the world moves money and information — and then I turned the fortune it created into something even bigger.
Because the best thing that can happen sometimes is losing what you thought you wanted.
That’s when you discover what you’re really capable of building.
