TERMINAL
"Getting fired is the best thing that can happen to you. You just don't know it at the time." — Michael Bloomberg
ONE
THE FIRING
INT. SALOMON BROTHERS TRADING FLOOR, NEW YORK - DAY (1981)
The Salomon Brothers trading floor. A chaos of screaming traders, ringing phones, and cigarette smoke. This is Wall Street at its most primal — men in loosened ties shouting orders, crumpled paper everywhere, the raw capitalism of the early 1980s.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, 39, stands in a glass-walled office overlooking the floor. He has been at Salomon for fifteen years. He started as a parking lot attendant. He worked his way to partner. He is now head of equities, information systems, and operations.
Salomon Brothers. 1981. The most powerful bond trading firm on Wall Street.
JOHN GUTFREUND, the CEO, enters Bloomberg's office. His face is expressionless.
GUTFREUND
Mike. Sit down.
BLOOMBERG
(already standing, suspicious)
I'll stand.
GUTFREUND
Phibro is acquiring Salomon. There's going to be a restructuring. Your position is being eliminated.
BLOOMBERG
(a beat)
Eliminated. You mean fired.
GUTFREUND
I mean your equity stake will be cashed out. $10 million. You'll have a generous severance.
BLOOMBERG
I built the information systems for this firm. I modernized the trading floor. I —
GUTFREUND
(cutting him off)
And I thank you for that. Your check will be ready on Friday.
Bloomberg stares at Gutfreund. Fifteen years. From parking cars to partner. And now, at thirty-nine, he is being shown the door with a check and a handshake.
BLOOMBERG (breaking the fourth wall)
I got fired on a Wednesday. By Thursday, I had a business plan. People think getting fired is the end. It's not. It's the beginning. When you have nothing to lose, you can do anything. And I had $10 million and fifteen years of knowing exactly what Wall Street needed and didn't have.
INT. BLOOMBERG'S APARTMENT, MANHATTAN - NIGHT (1981)
Bloomberg sits at his kitchen table with a yellow legal pad. He is writing furiously. Around him: stacks of financial data, Wall Street Journals, computer manuals. He has not slept.
He writes at the top of a fresh page: "WHAT DO TRADERS NEED THAT THEY DON'T HAVE?"
Below it, he lists: Real-time bond pricing. Analytics. Historical data. Yield curves. All on one screen. Instantly.
BLOOMBERG
(V.O.)
In 1981, if you were a bond trader, you got your data from a Quotron machine that showed stock prices and a Telerate machine that showed Treasury yields. That was it. No analytics. No history. No tools. If you wanted to calculate the yield on a thirty-year bond, you used a Hewlett-Packard calculator and a pencil. I knew — because I had been one of them — that traders would pay anything for a machine that did the math for them. Not a computer. Computers were complicated. A terminal. Simple. Fast. Everything a trader needs on one screen.
INT. ONE METROTECH CENTER, BROOKLYN - DAY (1982)
A small office. No windows. Fluorescent lighting. BLOOMBERG and CHUCK ZEGAR sit at folding tables surrounded by computer equipment. Wires everywhere. Coffee cups. Pizza boxes. They have been building the Bloomberg Terminal for four months.
Innovative Market Systems. Founded 1981. Later renamed Bloomberg L.P. Starting capital: $10 million of Bloomberg's own money.
ZEGAR
(typing code)
The analytics engine is working. I can calculate yields, durations, convexity — all in real time. But the data feed is the bottleneck. We need live pricing from every major bond dealer.
BLOOMBERG
I'll get the data. You build the machine. How fast can it calculate a yield curve?
ZEGAR
Two seconds.
BLOOMBERG
Make it one.
ZEGAR
Mike, the hardware can only —
BLOOMBERG
Then get better hardware. A trader's attention span is three seconds. If our terminal takes two seconds to answer a question, the trader has already moved on. One second. That's the target.
INT. MERRILL LYNCH OFFICES, NEW YORK - DAY (1982)
Bloomberg walks into Merrill Lynch carrying a prototype terminal under his arm. He is meeting with Merrill's head of fixed income. The prototype is beige, bulky, and ugly. But when he turns it on, it sings.
BLOOMBERG
(setting up the terminal)
Give me any bond. Any bond in your portfolio. Right now.
MERRILL EXECUTIVE
(skeptical)
Fine. The 10-year Treasury. November 2012 maturity.
Bloomberg types. The screen displays: current price, yield, duration, convexity, historical price chart, comparison to similar bonds — all in under a second.
MERRILL EXECUTIVE
(leaning forward)
That's... that's everything. Right there. How does it do the convexity calculation so fast?
BLOOMBERG
It does it in real time. Every bond. Every market. Every second. And it updates automatically. No more calling the desk. No more HP calculators. Just look at the screen.
MERRILL EXECUTIVE
How much?
BLOOMBERG
$1,000 a month per terminal. Merrill buys twenty, I'll give you a discount.
Merrill Lynch orders twenty-two terminals. Then forty. Then two hundred. The Bloomberg Terminal has found its first customer — and the customer can't stop buying.
Merrill Lynch's initial order: 22 terminals. By 1984: 5,000. Merrill also invested $30 million in Bloomberg's company for a 30% stake.
CUT TO:
TWO
THE TERMINAL
INT. BLOOMBERG L.P. OFFICES, PARK AVENUE - DAY (1990)
The company has moved from a windowless room in Brooklyn to a gleaming Park Avenue office. The floor is open-plan — Bloomberg's insistence. No private offices. No corner suites. Bloomberg sits at the same size desk as every other employee. The only difference: a bowl of free candy on his desk.
BLOOMBERG
(addressing new hires)
Three rules. One: the customer is always right, even when they're wrong, because they're paying us. Two: if someone has a better idea, we use it, regardless of whose idea it was. Three: there are no private offices at Bloomberg. Not for me, not for anyone. Ideas travel faster in open spaces. Walls kill innovation.
NEW HIRE
(raising hand)
Mr. Bloomberg, what if someone needs privacy for a phone call?
BLOOMBERG
Use the fish tank.
He points to a small glass-walled conference room.
BLOOMBERG
(continuing)
Every call you make in the fish tank, everyone can see you're on the phone. They just can't hear what you're saying. That's the right amount of transparency.
INT. BLOOMBERG NEWS STUDIO - DAY (1990)
A brand-new television studio. Bloomberg has launched Bloomberg News — a financial wire service that will grow into a global media empire. PATTI HARRIS oversees the setup.
HARRIS
Mike, the news service is up and running. Fifty reporters. Twenty-four-hour financial news. But the journalism establishment is laughing at us. They say a terminal company can't do real journalism.
BLOOMBERG
Good. Let them laugh. While they're laughing, we'll be breaking stories. Here's my philosophy on media: the terminal gives us data. The news service gives us context. Together, they give the customer something no one else can: understanding. That's what people will pay for. Not data. Not news. Understanding.
HARRIS
The Wall Street Journal isn't going to like having competition.
BLOOMBERG
(grinning)
The Wall Street Journal wasn't my customer. And now they're not my competition either. They cover Wall Street. We are Wall Street.
INT. BLOOMBERG L.P. OFFICES - DAY (1996)
A milestone. The 100,000th Bloomberg Terminal has been installed. It sits in a glass case in the lobby. Bloomberg stands beside it with his team.
1996. 100,000 Bloomberg Terminals installed worldwide. Annual revenue: $2 billion. The terminal has become the lingua franca of global finance.
BLOOMBERG
(to the crowd)
One hundred thousand terminals. Every major bank, every hedge fund, every central bank in the world has one. But I want to tell you something that will make you uncomfortable: we are not done. Not even close. There are markets we haven't entered. Data we haven't captured. Customers we haven't reached. The day we think we're finished is the day we start dying.
BLOOMBERG (breaking the fourth wall)
People ask me why I didn't take the company public. The answer is simple: Wall Street would have told me to cut costs, raise prices, and focus on quarterly earnings. That's the opposite of what makes this company great. We win by reinvesting everything into making the terminal better. Every year, we add features. Every year, we hire engineers. Every year, the terminal becomes more indispensable. You can't do that when you're worried about your stock price.
INT. BLOOMBERG'S HOME, MANHATTAN - NIGHT (2001)
Bloomberg sits with DIANA TAYLOR. He is 59 years old. He has just announced he is running for mayor of New York City. As a Republican. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one.
DIANA
You're a lifelong Democrat running as a Republican in the most Democratic city in America. Explain to me how this works.
BLOOMBERG
The Democratic primary is a circus. Seven candidates. I can't win a primary. But the Republican primary? I just have to beat one guy. Then I run as a competent manager against whichever Democrat survives the knife fight.
DIANA
You've never held elected office. You've never run for anything. What makes you think you can manage a city of eight million people?
BLOOMBERG
I manage a company of fifteen thousand people in forty countries. A city is just a bigger company with worse real estate.
DIANA
(shaking her head, smiling)
You're going to spend a fortune on this, aren't you?
BLOOMBERG
I am going to spend whatever it takes. I don't take donations. I don't owe anyone anything. That is the entire point. The only way to be an honest politician is to pay for it yourself.
Bloomberg spent $73 million of his own money on his first mayoral campaign. He won by three percentage points, two months after September 11, 2001.
DISSOLVE TO:
THREE
THE MAYOR
INT. CITY HALL, NEW YORK - DAY (JANUARY 2002)
Bloomberg's first day as mayor. He walks into City Hall and immediately hates it. The building is old, compartmentalized, full of private offices and closed doors. The opposite of everything he believes in.
BLOOMBERG
(to an aide)
Where is the bullpen?
AIDE
The what?
BLOOMBERG
The open floor. Where everyone sits together. Where I can see my team and they can see me.
AIDE
Sir, this is City Hall. The mayor has a private office. Every mayor has had a private office.
BLOOMBERG
Not this one. Convert the Board of Estimate chamber into an open-plan office. I sit in the middle. Commissioners around me. No walls. No doors. Just work.
Bloomberg transformed City Hall into an open-plan "bullpen," becoming the first mayor to sit in an open office alongside his staff.
INT. CITY HALL BULLPEN - DAY (2003)
The bullpen in full operation. Bloomberg sits at a desk identical to everyone else's. Around him, commissioners and aides work in the open. He can hear every conversation. He walks over to people's desks instead of calling meetings.
BLOOMBERG
(standing at a commissioner's desk)
The smoking ban. Where are we?
HEALTH COMMISSIONER
The restaurant industry is threatening to sue. They say it will destroy nightlife. Kill jobs.
BLOOMBERG
Second-hand smoke kills twelve hundred New Yorkers a year. The restaurant industry will adapt. Sign the ban. We'll deal with the lawsuits.
HEALTH COMMISSIONER
The bar owners are going to go crazy.
BLOOMBERG
Good. Going crazy is temporary. Lung cancer is permanent. Sign it.
The NYC smoking ban, enacted in 2003, became a model for cities worldwide. The restaurant industry did not collapse. Revenue increased.
INT. CITY HALL - DAY (2008)
The global financial crisis. Lehman Brothers has collapsed. The stock market is crashing. New York City's tax revenue is plummeting. Bloomberg addresses his team.
BLOOMBERG
The financial crisis is going to cost this city five billion dollars in lost tax revenue. We are not going to respond by panicking. We are going to respond by being smarter. Every department: find 5% in savings. Not layoffs — efficiencies. Use data. Find waste. Cut it.
HARRIS
Mike, the unions are going to fight any cuts.
BLOOMBERG
Then I'll fight the unions. I don't owe them anything. I didn't take their money. I took my money. That's the whole point of self-funding. Nobody owns you.
INT. BLOOMBERG'S HOME - NIGHT (2013)
Bloomberg's last year as mayor. Twelve years. Three terms. He sits with Diana, reflecting.
DIANA
Twelve years. What are you most proud of?
BLOOMBERG
(thinking)
The data. We made New York City the most data-driven government in the world. Every pothole, every crime, every health inspection — tracked, measured, improved. The city works better because we measured it better.
DIANA
And what do you regret?
BLOOMBERG
(a pause)
Stop-and-frisk. I believed it was saving lives. The data showed crime was going down. But data doesn't capture everything. It doesn't capture what it feels like to be stopped on your own street because of the color of your skin. I should have listened to that.
CUT TO:
FOUR
THE MISSION
INT. BLOOMBERG PHILANTHROPIES, NEW YORK - DAY (2014)
After leaving City Hall, Bloomberg turns his full attention to philanthropy. His offices are, predictably, open-plan. Screens display data on climate change, gun violence, public health. He runs his philanthropy exactly like a business.
BLOOMBERG
(to his philanthropy team)
Here is how we are going to spend our money. Climate. Guns. Public health. Education. These are the four things that kill people or keep them poor. We are going to attack each one with data, money, and persistence. Not feel-good campaigns. Results.
PHILANTHROPY DIRECTOR
The coal plant campaign — we've helped close 280 coal plants in the U.S. since 2011. The Sierra Club partnership is working.
BLOOMBERG
Good. I want all of them closed. Every coal plant in America. Then we move to Europe. Then Asia. Climate change doesn't care about borders. Neither should we.
Bloomberg Philanthropies has donated over $17 billion to climate, public health, education, and the arts. It is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world.
INT. CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS - DAY (NOVEMBER 2019)
Bloomberg announces his candidacy for President of the United States. The room is packed with cameras. He stands at a podium, 77 years old.
BLOOMBERG
(to the press)
I'm running for president because I think we need a problem-solver, not a politician. I've built a company. I've run a city. I know how to manage complex organizations. And I believe I can beat Donald Trump.
REPORTER
You're worth $60 billion. Aren't you just trying to buy the election?
BLOOMBERG
I'm spending my own money because I don't want to owe anyone anything. Same reason I did it as mayor. If spending your own money disqualifies you, then we're saying only people who take money from special interests should run for office. That seems backwards.
INT. DEMOCRATIC DEBATE STAGE, LAS VEGAS - NIGHT (FEBRUARY 2020)
The debate stage. Bloomberg stands at a podium. ELIZABETH WARREN stands two podiums away. The moderator asks the first question. Warren attacks immediately.
WARREN
I'd like to talk about who we're running against. A billionaire who calls women "fat broads" and "horse-faced lesbians." And no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump. I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg.
Bloomberg freezes. He is not used to this. In business, you control the conversation. In politics, the conversation controls you.
BLOOMBERG
(stiffly)
I — none of those — those are taken out of context —
It is the worst debate performance by a major candidate in modern history. Bloomberg, the man who built a communications empire, cannot communicate.
BLOOMBERG (breaking the fourth wall)
I spent a billion dollars on that campaign. I won American Samoa. That's it. American Samoa. You know what I learned? You can't data your way through a debate. Politics is emotional. It's personal. It's messy. And I am not a messy person. I am a systems person. Some systems are not meant to be optimized. They're meant to be felt. I never learned how to do that in public.
INT. BLOOMBERG L.P. HEADQUARTERS - DAY (PRESENT)
Bloomberg walks through his company's headquarters. The open-plan floor. The free food. The terminals glowing on every desk. 325,000 terminals now, in every major financial institution on earth.
BLOOMBERG
(V.O.)
I got fired in 1981. I was thirty-nine years old. I had $10 million and an idea for a machine that would give traders the data they needed. That machine became a company. The company became a media empire. The media empire led to City Hall. City Hall led to a presidential campaign that I lost spectacularly. And the whole thing started because John Gutfreund showed me the door.
He pauses at a window overlooking Manhattan. The city he governed for twelve years. The city where he got fired. The city where he built everything.
BLOOMBERG
(V.O., continuing)
If I could go back and tell Gutfreund one thing, I'd say thank you. Not sarcastically. Genuinely. Thank you for firing me. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And that $10 million severance? Best investment return in the history of Wall Street.
He walks to his desk. No corner office. Just a desk in the middle of the floor, same as everyone else. A bowl of candy. A Bloomberg Terminal. And the quiet satisfaction of a man who took a firing and turned it into everything.
FADE TO BLACK.
Michael Bloomberg's net worth exceeds $100 billion. Bloomberg L.P. generates over $12 billion in annual revenue and employs approximately 20,000 people worldwide. The Bloomberg Terminal remains the dominant data platform on Wall Street, with over 325,000 subscriptions at approximately $24,000 per year each. Bloomberg served three terms as mayor of New York City (2002-2013), spending over $250 million of his own money on his three campaigns. His 2020 presidential campaign spent approximately $1 billion. Bloomberg Philanthropies has donated over $17 billion, with major focuses on climate change, gun safety, and public health. He was instrumental in closing over 500 coal plants in the United States. He lives with Diana Taylor in Manhattan. He still eats lunch at the company cafeteria. He has signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give away the majority of his fortune.
Suggested Director: David Fincher. Suggested Composer: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
THE END