The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg

The tech mogul turned New York City mayor proved billionaires can be good politicians, according to this admiring but not sugarcoated biography. Journalist Randolph recounts Michael Bloomberg’s reshaping of Wall Street with the 1982 introduction of his Bloomberg Terminals, which give up-to-the-nanosecond market data and analysis to traders. In Randolph’s telling, Bloomberg was a hard-charging leader who demanded fanatical devotion from employees and who allegedly allowed a woman-unfriendly corporate culture to flourish; one employee claimed Bloomberg told her to “kill it” when she was pregnant. The book’s heart is its chronicle of Bloomberg’s 2002–2013 tenure as mayor of New York City, in which, Randolph judges, he proved competent and innovative—overhauling the city’s schools, building bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, banning smoking in bars—though his technocratic politics had failings too, including the police stop-and-frisk program that Bloomberg defended as a measure to prevent gun violence, but which many New Yorkers denounced as racist. In Randolph’s coverage of his post-mayoral philanthropy, Bloomberg is depicted as a kind of anti-Trump, a domineering tycoon who is stable, centrist, and environmentally conscious. Randolph’s respectful but clear-eyed profile unearths a complex, prickly personality beneath Bloomberg’s uncharismatic surface, perceiving in his “dreary monotone” the “nasal voice of New York City.” The result is a vivid, timely study of Bloomberg’s brand of plutocracy. Photos. (Sept.)