Bloomberg is seventy-one and conspicuously vigorous. He does not intend to retire. Yet he has told friends that he does not know what he will do next. “I can tell you what I want to do,” he said to me in late July. We sat at a tiny conference table in a cavernous office on the second floor of City Hall, which he shares with fifty members of his staff. He had taken off his charcoal suit jacket. “I haven’t had a vacation in twelve years,” he said. He imagined a week of skiing and a week of golf. “After that, I’d go ballistic.”
Bloomberg does not plan to return to running his business, Bloomberg L.P. Kevin Sheekey, who has been one of the Mayor’s top political strategists for the past twelve years, said that he expects Bloomberg to go through a sort of “re-start,” as he did when he left Wall Street, in 1981, and when he entered politics, in 2001.
Bloomberg has pledged to give away most of his fortune before he dies. That effort is under way. In 2011, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported, Bloomberg donated more money to charity than all but four other Americans: Margaret A. Cargill, William S. Dietrich II, Paul Allen, and George Soros. He has a foundation, which every year gives away several hundred million dollars to a range of causes, with an emphasis on public health, government innovation, the environment, education, and the arts. The foundation has pledged a hundred million dollars to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative; six hundred million to combat smoking overseas; fifty million to support family planning; and another fifty million to the Sierra Club’s drive to reduce the nation’s reliance on coal plants. Bloomberg himself has reportedly given three million dollars to help establish Mayors Against Illegal Guns—one of many contributions he has made to advance gun-control laws—and $1.1 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. Nevertheless, he said, “I don’t see myself as a full-time philanthropist.” (...)
It is hard to imagine the endeavor that would sufficiently command Bloomberg’s restless ambition and vanity. He is an outsized character: the biggest plutocrat in a plutocratic capital, a creature of Wall Street who, flagrantly and legally, tapped his limitless bank account to become, and remain, mayor. Seeking a third term required him to ask the City Council to amend the City Charter on his behalf, about which he is unapologetic. “I can tell you that when it came to a third term the City Council majority thought it was good to change” the charter, he said. “And the public elected me.”
In private and in his natural social milieu, in the town houses and penthouses of the Upper East Side and Central Park West, Bloomberg is voluble, self-absorbed, brilliant. At dinner parties, while drinking copious amounts of wine, he makes plain his contempt for the New York Times, the media property friends say that he covets but most likely cannot own, and for President Obama, who occupies the office he craves but will never achieve.
by Ken Auletta, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Pari Dukovic
