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Bloomberg history
Bloomberg company history timeline
There’s the Windows PC, which traces its heritage back to the original IBM PC announced in August 1981.
When Harvard Business School graduate Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers Inc. in October of 1981, he began to explore the idea of establishing his own business.
In 1981, Salomon Brothers was acquired, and Michael Bloomberg, a general partner, was given a $10 million partnership settlement.
The Market Master terminal, later called the Bloomberg Terminal, was released to market in December 1982.
It’s what enabled not only the Terminal but other devices such as 1984’s way-before-its-time QuoTrek, a wireless handheld gizmo for investors.
Merrill Lynch released IMS from this restriction in 1984.
In the spring of 1986 Bloomberg changed the company's name from IMS to Bloomberg L.P. and expanded his customer base from "buy side" firms--pension funds, central banks, mutual funds, insurers&mdashø the "sell side" of the financial industry--securities underwriters and trading firms.
In 1986, just 5 years after its inception, the company had already installed 5,000 of their terminals in subscribers’ offices.
In September 1988, Winkler's positive profile of Bloomberg and his campaign to unseat Telerate as a financial data industry leader was published on page one of the Journal, an irony that was not lost on Michael Bloomberg.
Technological developments throughout these years also fueled the firm's growth. For example, a new securities trading feature allowed the firm to launch the Bloomberg Trading System in 1988—an electronic bond trading system that made the company a player in the electronic commerce arena before the term e-commerce had even been coined.
With Bloomberg's global network now including a new office in Sydney, Australia, Bloomberg met with Winkler again in early 1989 to explore the possibility of expanding Bloomberg's services to include business news.
By 1991, Bloomberg was expanding its offerings at a pace of roughly one new service a day, providing everything from ski reports, weather forecasts, and real estate listings to horoscopes, classified ads, and sports scores.
By the end of the 1991, Bloomberg L.P.'s worth was approaching an estimated $800 million, and with 14,000 installed terminals it was gaining new subscribers faster than any other firm in the $3.5 billion specialized information industry.
By 1991, Bloomberg Business News had opened bureaus in New York, Washington, London, Tokyo, Toronto, and New Jersey.
In 1992, Bloomberg unveiled a secure E-mail system known as "Bloomberg Message" for his subscribers, which anticipated by several years the Internet-driven explosion in the use of E-mail as a routine form of business-to-business communication.
Bloomberg.com was first established on September 29, 1993, as a financial portal with information on markets, currency conversion, news and events, and Bloomberg Terminal subscriptions.
Each new media venture spurred a leap in sales of Bloomberg terminals, which by late 1993 numbered more than 31,000 worldwide, catapulting Bloomberg's sales to $370 million.
In January of 1994, Bloomberg Information Television, a 24-hour financial news service produced by Maryland Public Television and distributed by DirecTV, made its debut.
In the United States, the contraction of the bond, derivatives, and mortgage markets in 1994 presented Bloomberg with the first drop in sales growth in its 12-year history.
In 1994 it added Bloomberg Television, a business news channel.
The company also began publishing the Bloomberg Magazine, and in 1994, launched a new Sunday insert magazine called Bloomberg Personal.
After opening bureaus in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Beijing, and with plans under way for a new bureau in India, by the end of 1995 the global network of Bloomberg Business News comprised 335 reporters in 56 bureaus.
In 1995 Bloomberg launched a web site, which by the end of the year was offering a live audio feed of its radio broadcast.
In 1995, the firm began allowing subscribers to access its data from any PC, but restricted the actual download of raw data so that users could do little more than dump numbers into spreadsheet software.
Forbes magazine ranked Bloomberg L.P. 223rd in the 1996 Forbes 400 (by sales), and media mogul Rupert Murdoch has described Bloomberg's founder, Michael Bloomberg, as "the most creative media entrepreneur of our time and, with Bill Gates, perhaps the most successful."
That same year, the company started an investing magazine called Bloomberg Personal that was distributed as a Sunday newspaper supplement, and in 1996 it opened Bloomberg Press, which published books for financial professionals and the general public on investing, economics, and current affairs.
Bloomberg Press began publishing works from its two imprints, Bloomberg Personal Bookshelf, aimed at consumers, and Bloomberg Professional Library, targeting financial professionals, in 1996.
In late 1996, Bloomberg bought back one-third of Merrill Lynch's 30 percent stake in the company for $200 million, valuing the company at $2 billion.
In December of 1997, it conducted its first Webcast (a live broadcast via the Web) of the Bloomberg Forum.
By spring 1997, Bloomberg's business was evenly split: half his customers wanted to purchase his data for use through their PCs and half wanted the traditional Bloomberg terminal.
As Bloomberg’s 1997 memoir Bloomberg on Bloomberg notes, Merrill Lynch owned 30% of his company in the early years and benefited from an exclusivity agreement that prevented Bloomberg from selling Terminals to Merrill Lynch’s major rivals.
Early in 1998, the firm moved into interactive television products and also inked a content agreement with America Online, which began hosting live Bloomberg news feeds.
That year, in what many would later call one of his most astute maneuvers, Bloomberg convinced the New York Times to publish Bloomberg Business News articles with the Bloomberg byline in exchange for providing the newspaper with a free terminal. It wasn't until January 1, 1999 that Bloomberg began charging a monthly fee for the terminals it had been giving away for free to newspapers and magazines.
LendingTree Inc. and Bloomberg launched an online consumer loan center in 1999.
In 2000, small business site Inc.com began adding articles to various sections of the Entrepreneur Network, covering such small business topics as financing options, management issues, marketing efforts, tax strategies, and e-business solutions.
In 2008, facing losses during the financial crisis, Merrill Lynch agreed to sell its remaining 20 percent stake in the company back to Bloomberg Inc., majority-owned by Michael Bloomberg, for a reported $4.43 billion, valuing Bloomberg L.P. at approximately $22.5 billion.
In 2009 the company acquired BusinessWeek magazine (renamed Bloomberg BusinessWeek).
Winkler remained editor in chief of Bloomberg News until 2014, when he was replaced by English journalist John Micklethwait, former editor in chief of The Economist.
Bloomberg Employees Get Access to Hospital’s Vaccine SlotsA company memo on Tuesday informed the staff that NYU Langone would “provide vaccines for Bloomberg employees who meet the eligibility requirements.”By Katie RobertsonMarch 30, 2021
The media equation5 Pieces of Good News About the NewsA look at some of the ventures that have sprung up, fueled by a new sense of mission in American journalism and by the sheer quantities of money available.By Ben SmithJuly 11, 2021
Project Management conferences to look out for in 2021
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Bloomberg competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Citi | 1812 | $74.3B | 210,000 | 1,228 |
| MarketWatch | 1997 | $10.5M | 246 | - |
| Mastercard | 1966 | $1.8T | 25,000 | 781 |
| Morgan Stanley | 1935 | $3.0B | 68,097 | 1,096 |
| TheStreet | 1996 | $62.5M | 800 | - |
| Boston Consulting Group | 1963 | $7.5B | 22,000 | 195 |
| Fujitsu | 2008 | $3.6B | 10,001 | 70 |
| Compunnel | 1994 | $360.0M | 1,371 | 73 |
| Orion Systems Integrators | 1993 | $110.0M | 500 | - |
| Open Systems Technologies | 1990 | $110.0M | 750 | 17 |
Bloomberg history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Bloomberg, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Bloomberg. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Bloomberg. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Bloomberg. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Bloomberg and its employees or that of Zippia.
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