On November 5, 2014, Mike Bloomberg settled in front of a Bloomberg terminal, logged on with his “B-unit” biometric identity card and prepared to send an email to his employees. He’d been gone 12 years, balancing budgets at City Hall and reshaping New York on a grand scale. Three terms running the greatest city on Earth. Now he was back where he began, at Bloomberg L.P., his $9 billion financial data and media company. He’d started showing up, days after leaving politics, at a desk on the fifth floor of the company’s glassy Lexington Avenue headquarters. He attended editorial meetings and involved himself in business strategy. He watched. He listened. In September, he had announced that he would be resuming CEO duties. Now this would be his first all-staff message since then. He had to choose his words carefully.

Bloomberg employees never imagined this level of involvement from the now 73-year-old oligarch. They expected him to decamp for philanthropy or relax with his grandkid, maybe write an occasional column about gun control for Bloomberg View, the editorial vehicle designed to promote The Mayor’s causes and filled with pedigreed smart types housed in a beautiful Stanford White-designed townhouse on the Upper East Side. They thought Bloomberg would cloister himself there with coffee and the Economist. But he was The Owner again now. And everyone—including perhaps The Mayor himself—had underestimated The Owner’s desire for control.

He was, in the view of one former Bloomberg executive, “schizoid,” at once the corporate chieftain obsessed with keeping his lucrative data terminal business humming for Wall Street traders and the politician with an insatiable lust for influence through his broader media platforms, including television and magazines. He was a data guy, cold and logical, who cracked down on smoking cigarettes in New York because they were bad, then banned trans fat in restaurants, also bad, then tried to ban soda as liquid evil. But he was also a man of consequence. It wasn’t enough to be mayor twice—he changed the law to get a third term. He was never going to just sit around and read the Economist and give money away. He had to return to his company and rejigger it somehow, control it from within, cause ripples without. The oligarch was The Owner some days. On others, he was The Mayor. His intentions were often inscrutable.

Either way, Mike Bloomberg had already accepted the resignation of Dan Doctoroff, the CEO he installed in 2008 to watch over the company while he kept watch over the city. There was no struggle—Doctoroff referred to him as “God”—but there had been strain. A week before the transition became public, the two performed the ALS ice bucket challenge with a large group of staffers in the office courtyard. Doctoroff’s father and uncle had died of ALS, and as he counted down and raised his bucket, Bloomberg dashed in from stage right and hurled his ice water on Doctoroff, who then, roaring too loudly and overlong, dumped his bucket on the boss. It had been scripted, of course, as a buddy routine, but they had slicked the courtyard with alpha male awkwardness. The larger symbolism of corporate minions in the background robotically dumping cold water on their own heads while executives drenched each other was lost on them. Such was the Bloomberg Way.

Matt Winkler was a separate matter. At The Owner’s behest, Winkler, an eccentric rarely seen outside a bow tie, had founded Bloomberg News in 1990 and built it into the giant centerpiece of an expanding media portfolio. His identity, news despot and enforcer of the Bloomberg Way, was so enmeshed with the wire service that excising him might cause a terrible disturbance. Bucketing Winkler would require more tact. In 2013, Winkler had shamed the company with an embarrassing China mess, killing an investigative story about a well-connected billionaire tycoon, which might have been the right thing to do for the business—the Chinese government would have been furious—but definitely was not the right thing for the journalism. Winkler had even popped off about Nazis to the reporters while spiking their story. He’d done it on tape, likening China to the Third Reich in a screwball justification for killing the piece.

And everyone—including perhaps The Mayor himself—had underestimated The Owner’s desire for control.

It was a spectacle that highlighted the conflict of interest at the heart of Bloomberg News, which existed, by design and admission, to sell Bloomberg terminals. The China story wasn’t worth the risk to the business. It had to die. But instead of strangling it behind a dumpster, Winkler had jabbered about Nazis.

Just as bad, the river of money from the terminals—an estimated $7 billion in revenue each year (combined with another $2 billion from other parts of the company)—produced little journalism, proportionally, to be proud of in any intellectual or service-to-the-republic sense. Yes, Bloomberg Businessweek had made a splash since Bloomberg bought it in December 2009—winning awards and offering eye-popping covers with airplanes mating in midair or a struggling hedge-fund guy with a flaccid arrow pointing downward from his zipper. But most Bloomberg stories had scant impact beyond finance circles. Bloomberg TV remained so unpopular that Nielsen didn’t even rate it. An influx of new talent at Bloomberg Media to this point had not delivered on the promise of more consumer-friendly journalism to broaden Bloomberg’s reach. And the Washington operation? The bureau was in the midst of an increasingly pitched war with the seat of empire, in part because the company had just launched a walled-off politics vertical, based in New York and built around two journalism stars with seven-figure salaries, that was already competing, bizarrely, with Bloomberg’s own less lavishly compensated staffers in Washington.

Champagne Toast Just months after Mike Bloomberg returned to the newsroom, the outlet won its first Pulitzer. “What took so fucking long?” he joked to a colleague. | Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

It was simpler when the boss had decamped for City Hall, weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Back then, the company had 7,800 employees. By Bloomberg’s return, the company had doubled in staff and, in the case of Bloomberg News, stretched across 150 bureaus in 73 countries. Within months, the wire service would win its first Pulitzer Prize for a “painstaking, clear and entertaining explanation of how so many U.S. corporations dodge taxes and why lawmakers and regulators have a hard time stopping them.” But now, in the doldrums of late fall 2014 in New York, Mike Bloomberg was just starting to reorganize his empire. Could he have the award-winning high-profile content he craved without undermining his profit center, the all-important terminal?

Bloomberg had a new editor in mind who might help—a man with brains, a writer of books, a self-deprecating Brit. He might sort it out. Right now, however, Bloomberg needed to send that email, his first missive as the returned chief. Who would he be in this moment? He needed to address the troops. All the many thousands of them around the world. Time to take charge. The company was an ocean liner, but the right leadership could make it dance on the waves.

So he sent the following:

To All Bloomberg People

Hi. It’s great to be back and start to meet all 16,000 hard-working Bloomberg employees. Obviously, it’ll take me some time to learn everyone’s name, so if I don’t recognize you immediately, please bear with me.

One thing that helps are the badges we all wear around our necks. Unfortunately, when one puts our B-unit on the same lanyard as the badge, 50% of the time we block our names and photos. It makes the memory process for someone my age more difficult (and creates an issue for our hard working security guards). To help everyone, it makes sense to do what I do: badge on the lanyard, B-Unit in your pocket.

Tks, Mike

Yeah, Mike Bloomberg was back.

***

Anyone who wonders how Mike Bloomberg is worth $37 billon should take a look at a Bloomberg terminal, that reliquary of financial data. Not the new ones you see in photos of traders at work, with the flat screens and an online portal, but the old, boxy models with the chunky keys, all linked together to stream stock and bond prices. It was an email network before email caught on, a hive-minded revolution. When I was in journalism school in 2004, we had a middle-aged model down a dark corridor, a mysterious ark from another dimension of information.

Introduced in 1983, the terminals helped transform Wall Street and created a fortune for the boss. In the 1970s, traders were still crunching stock and bond data by marking up broadsheets. Bloomberg, who had grown up in the Boston area, become an Eagle Scout and gone on to a career in finance, was working at Salomon Brothers at the time, developing digital financial tools for a computer he dubbed the B Page. He saw an opportunity to take those tools to a wider market. It was the dawn of the personal computer era, and after Salomon Brothers laid him off with a $10 million severance check, Bloomberg had the resources to build his magic box and the company he would fashion in his image.

Today, the faithful call the terminal The Bloomberg, as if man and machine had merged, humanity transubstantiated into circuitry. Tom Secunda, one of the company’s co-founders and the chief architect of the terminal, sometimes acts as though he were The Bloomberg. “There are certainly places where I can still be a more important product, where I can still make my product more valuable so that people buy me,” Secunda told Fortune in 2013.

Winkler was fanatical about The Bloomberg. Once, he fired a reporter after a computer glitch published a headline too soon. When colleagues asked Winkler to reinstate the man and—apostasy!—faulted The Bloomberg, Winkler exploded: “No. The enemy was not the computer. That’s wrong. … I figured that a lot of you were going to think this way. It’s wrong! It’s not the computer! It’s the human!”

The Bloomberg was often seen inside the company it built as a sort of heavenly body. Dan Doctoroff likened it to the sun, a “life-giving force” that sustains its orbiting planets of business and media ventures. The CEO kept a model of the solar system near his desk, with a tiny replica of The Bloomberg affixed to the sun. The analogy might have even been too limited. There are now 324,000 Bloombergs in operation. Each brings in more than $20,000 in annual subscription fees per user. Bloomberg’s annual revenue is about $9 billion, with gross profit approaching $3 billion, according to Douglas Taylor of Burton-Taylor International Consulting, a market research and consulting firm that closely tracks the privately held company. The lion’s share of that profit comes from the terminal, which Bloomberg’s media operation and its 2,400 journalists exist to serve. Started by Winkler as a supplement to the terminal, the wire service has evolved into an essential feature. Taylor estimates that Bloomberg’s terminal business would suffer a 30 to 50 percent hit if Bloomberg News were to disappear.

He was never going to just sit around and read the Economist and give money away. He had to return to his company and rejigger it somehow, control it from within.

The same cannot be said of the many layers of “added value” that comprise the other parts of Bloomberg’s media business—the magazines, the TV channels, the specialized verticals. Together, these are known as Bloomberg Media. They generally lose money. Lots of it. Businessweek, easily the most appealing product to consumers, reportedly burns almost $30 million a year. The TV operation has lost about $100 million a year for the past decade. Bloomberg Media is essentially a welfare state.

As any capitalist might point out, lack of accountability creates bloat. And there is bloat inside the empire, where some questionable schemes have been kept on life support for years. Examples: Bloomberg Muse (arts vertical, now shuttered), Bloomberg View (milquetoast opinion vertical, oft-maligned), Bloomberg TV (disaster, permanent). Of course, the money also creates room to experiment. Bloomberg Markets magazine has garnered awards by producing impressive, impactful work: on the supply chain connecting modern slavery in South America to cars and appliances manufactured in the United States; on injuries and deaths of participants in clinical trials throughout the United States; on life insurance companies withholding billions of dollars in benefits from the families of slain soldiers and other Americans.

And Bloomberg News does at times range beyond its all-important market-moving scooplets for the terminal to do first-rate investigative reporting. In 2011, the wire service published a deep dive about financial institutions that borrowed from the Federal Reserve after the stock market crash, journalism that only happened because Bloomberg pursued a costly lawsuit against the Fed to force it to release records. That same year, Bloomberg News won a prestigious George Polk Award for a series on the for-profit college industry. And another the following year for an investigation into how Western companies provide surveillance systems to authoritarian countries with abysmal human rights records.

These efforts, however, tend to be the exception. Every day, Bloomberg News cranks out 5,000 stories, mostly for people who stare at indices for a living. In the words of Winkler, Bloomberg News serves “those with the most at stake.” By that, he means the rich. Bloomberg Media has a similar goal, beyond salving The Mayor’s ego or producing the occasional news nugget. It works as a marketing and branding tool to surround those with the most at stake with the most Bloomberg. The trader can watch Bloomberg TV from his treadmill in the morning, scour Bloomberg’s financial data and news during the day, and curl up with Businessweek at night.

Doctoroff has often described the Bloomberg system as a virtuous cycle: “The more readers and viewers of Bloomberg News we have, particularly among corporate executives and government officials who make business news, the more influence we have. The more influence we have, the more access we have to them. The more access we have, the more market-moving information we have. That helps us sell more Bloomberg terminals. The more we sell, the more we invest back into our news organization, creating this wonderful virtuous cycle.”

Only a CEO who calls a billionaire God would consider servicing the rich a high virtue of the fourth estate.

***

Cracking the Bloomberg empire is a challenge. The company lauds transparency and practices secrecy. It is a bog rife with scuttlebutt and backbiting. The first person at Bloomberg I reached out to for this article was Josh Tyrangiel, who now runs content for Bloomberg’s consumer media properties, with a special focus on long-form journalism. I sent a message to Tyrangiel’s Gmail account, asking whether he would be willing to talk to me. Tyrangiel had done well by himself at Bloomberg, primarily in his role as editor of Businessweek, and had won a couple of national magazine awards. Mike Bloomberg liked the hip, young idea man, and Tyrangiel was rewarded with more clout. All I’d heard about him around magazine-land before I began reporting was positive: excellent manager, very smart, good taste.

He ratted me out immediately.

The next day, Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg flack, called to fish for information while explaining that nobody at the company would cooperate with my story—and nobody did, officially, despite numerous entreaties, nearly a dozen of them directed at Bloomberg himself. Other emails I sent to acquaintances resulted in curt, off-putting responses. From an editor I’ve written for several times who currently works there: “I can’t help you. Take care.” From a friend: “Thanks for thinking of me. I’ll let you know if I am available.”

Only later did I learn that it is a dire offense to fail to refer outside media overtures to Bloomberg overseers. All Bloomberg employees sign non-disclosure agreements just to get a job—fairly standard procedure for a financial company but an awkward muzzling of free speech for a news organization. Some also sign a “non-disparage clause” and promise never to say anything mean about their corporate master. Bloomberg even asks a few people—those it deems miscreants who have, say, forwarded Bloomberg messages to their personal email accounts—to sign language agreeing to cooperate with Bloomberg requests to access both their home computer and their work computer at their future job. “It creates a climate where there’s a presumption that if they’re trying to figure out who spoke to you, they would not think twice at looking at phone records,” says one former executive, describing a workplace culture that can provoke paranoia among its inhabitants. (Another source told me she’d had a nightmare that I was a Bloomberg spy sent to entrap her.)

Whispering private thoughts and opinions is frowned upon. The company has no offices and prides itself on being “horizontal.” When The Mayor returned to his old headquarters, company chairman Peter Grauer wanted to have a private conversation with him in a conference room. Bloomberg resisted, Grauer insisted. Bloomberg reluctantly went in, Grauer closed the door. Early the next week, Grauer came to work to find that the doors to the conference rooms had been removed.

Not surprisingly, then, few of the more than 30 current and former Bloomberg journalists and executives I spoke to for this article would go on the record. At headquarters in New York and in the newsroom in Washington, scores of cameras watch workers. Business cards don’t carry titles. Everyone is a citizen.

“It’s a fascistoid organization,” says Ben Richardson, formerly a top Bloomberg editor in Asia who quit over the company’s handling of a sensitive story.

Bloomberg's World Matt Winkler Founding editor of Bloomberg News, now editor in chief emeritus John Micklethwait Former Economist editor, recently named Bloomberg editor in chief Daniel Doctoroff Former CEO of Bloomberg LP, Mike Bloomberg’s deputy mayor of New York Peter Grauer Chairman of Bloomberg LP, helped handle China scandal fallout Justin Smith Bloomberg Media CEO focusing on business and products Josh Tyrangiel “Chief content officer” focusing on long-form, Businessweek editor Al Hunt Bloomberg News veteran in D.C., moved to Bloomberg View Laurie Hays Former Bloomberg News senior executive editor, now in PR Mark Halperin Bloomberg Politics managing editor, co-host of “With All Due Respect” John Heilemann Bloomberg Politics managing editor, co-host of “With All Due Respect” Photos: Getty Images; AP; Corbis; AP; Getty Images; UCLA Anderson/John Brecher via Flickr

Even so, information leaks. Like the anonymous letter to Gawker from someone claiming to be a Bloomberg employee about elevator access being turned off on a certain floor, apparently to discourage people from deserting their terminals. Also mentioned in the letter: the short supply of bathrooms, all the better to prevent lingering in the loo. In this context, Mike Bloomberg’s memo about badges no longer seems odd, a micromanaging detail from Forbes’s No. 14 wealthiest man in the world about ID-carrying protocol that irked female employees who don’t always have pockets on their outfits in which to stash B-units. Same goes for one of the first changes since Bloomberg’s return: the restoration of the time stamp on emails to remind everyone when workers clock in. Get to your desk by 6:58 a.m. or look like a slacker.

The unique media culture at Bloomberg borders on the cultish. The cult leader, at least until recently, was Matt Winkler. His bible? The Bloomberg Way, a hybrid of Strunk & White and the AP style guide written by Winkler that presents a paint-by-numbers approach to journalism, along with plenty of preaching: “As moral force makes journalism a calling for those who embrace it, the Bloomberg Way necessitates a respect for life, peace and harmony, education, family stability, social responsibility, transparency, free trade and free markets.”

The guide served a purpose once, when Bloomberg News first “launched” in the 1990s (The Bloomberg Way informs the writer that the word “launch” is forbidden—“reserved for ships, spacecraft and missiles”). At that time, Bloomberg News was an aggregator in New York. (The Bloomberg Way would like the writer to know that “the U.S. city stands alone,” without reference to its state.) Writers boiled down stories from the one-star editions of the Wall Street Journal into headlines, and “scrambled” (The Bloomberg Way requests that the writer please “leave the scrambling to the eggs”) to get them on the terminal before most traders woke up. The bible had its uses and its hidebound peculiarities, as did its author, a deeply idiosyncratic man with a bully’s rage.

“When Matt’s not screaming, he’s an OK guy,” says one Bloomberg News staffer. “But he gives off the vibe of a hand grenade with the pin pulled.”

Winkler sent weekly notes to the newsroom chastising people for failing to follow the Bloomberg Way. He wanted to be sure everyone marched in lockstep. But he also wanted the validation that comes from winning prizes, particularly the Pulitzer, and could never seem to understand why that trophy remained elusive. “We could hire Usain Bolt and he would never win another race,” says the same staffer. “If you hand a man a 100-pound sack of concrete and tell him to go win the 100-meter dash, it’s not going to work.”

Winkler had finally begun to mellow in recent years—hiring better talent and giving them more rein. But within the black box of the company, a bigger rift emerged between Winkler’s newswire juggernaut and Bloomberg Media, the consumer media division led by Tyrangiel, who was supposed to help bring fresh life to the organization, and Justin Smith, a former diplomat who had made his mark on the business side of journalism by turning the dusty Atlantic into a digital-age moneymaker.

The consumer media division was what would give Mike Bloomberg the cultural schwack he coveted. That was why he had insisted, over the protestations of advisers, on buying Businessweek in 2009. He didn’t care if the magazine was a financial albatross. Businessweek was a suitably dignified conversation piece, one that also helped the overall enterprise in a way that went beyond dollars and cents: Tycoons might not deign to talk to a lowly wire reporter, but they would sit down for an interview with a writer from an influential weekly. Tyrangiel was brought in to remake the magazine. The soft-eyed young editor was a protégé of Norm Pearlstine at Time but had no financial journalism experience, having previously worked at MTV, Vibe and Rolling Stone.

At Businessweek, Tyrangiel set about constructing his own fiefdom. The magazine occupied a floor filled with Brooklyn characters who stood out in contrast to the typical spit-shined employees. Some Bloomberg News staffers referred to the floor as “Williamsburg.” The two operations, so culturally out of sync, often clashed.

Tyrangiel mostly paid lip service to cooperating with Bloomberg News, according to multiple sources. He spoke often about a symbiotic relationship but made little headway in creating one. Slights piled up, sources on the news side recount: emails ignored, Businessweek writers dispatched to cover the same ground as beat reporters and resentment when Tyrangiel chose not to run magazine versions of Bloomberg News’ best efforts, including a series on student loans that won Polk and Loeb awards. (Instead, he hired a freelancer who “did a very superficial job,” according to a former editor at Bloomberg News.)

Resentment went both ways: Few Bloomberg News reporters had the chops to do magazine features, after all. Tyrangiel worked with the ones who did and, for understandable reasons, disdained a lot of Bloomberg News copy. He knew about good writing, had a vision and wanted his own people on the job. As adept as he was at politicking for both his publication and himself, however, Tyrangiel couldn’t broker a peace.

“Josh didn’t have the experience or the interest in what the Bloomberg terminal does every day,” says one former executive. “He’s more likely to go make documentaries.”

In a company that obsessively valued order and stability, fault lines were emerging: between the wire service and Tyrangiel’s shop, but more broadly and significantly, between data-driven terminal news and the highbrow content Bloomberg personally desired. The twin aims of making billions of dollars by churning data for the box and producing important work for the wider world, it turned out, were not always part of the “virtuous cycle” envisaged by Doctoroff. They were sometimes at odds. So, too, the hem-and-haw impulses within both Mike Bloomberg and the tyrannically flat culture of his company: Transparency and secrecy in one body; the desire for influence and the need to protect profit, The Mayor and The Owner, who, together, were The Oligarch. In retrospect, a crackup seems inevitable.

***

Top-notch journalism, particularly if performed by reporters constrained by news bureaucrats, deserves a celebration. Which is why a cluster of Bloomberg News people were tossing back dumplings and drinks at the China Club, a high-end restaurant and bar on the top floors of an old bank in Hong Kong, one night in February 2013. Winkler had flown over. So had Laurie Hays, an ambitious editor he had hired from the Wall Street Journal to help improve the caliber of reporting and writing at Bloomberg News. They were there, surrounded by wood paneling and expensive artwork, to toast a group of reporters and editors, working mainly in Hong Kong and China, who had published a series of stories exposing, in unprecedented detail, the enormous wealth accumulated by the families of China’s political leaders. The series included a bombshell piece on Xi Jinping, the incoming Communist Party boss. Bloomberg had gone right after him.

The stories won prizes, about everything short of the Pulitzer, which many inside and outside of the organization felt Bloomberg deserved. That award went to the New York Times, which had published China wealth stories of its own, including a more readable one about the outgoing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, a softer target than Xi. Still, Bloomberg News had, with one glorious stroke, rocketed itself to a new level of legitimacy and influence, on par with the Times, the Journal, the Associated Press, anybody. China was the high point for the company. Within months, it would be the nadir.

Bloomberg executives had already faced down the Chinese ambassador to the United States and other government officials in two tense meetings before publication. In one, the ambassador told Winkler that “bad things will happen to Bloomberg in China” if a Xi story ran. Winkler was undaunted. “I’m running the story,” he said.

After the series came out, Beijing blocked the Bloomberg website in China. Reporters were shut out of official events. Visas were yanked. The real pressure, however, came on the business side. The Chinese government stopped its state-owned companies from renting Bloomberg terminals. Bloomberg has about 4,000 terminals in China, according to Taylor, and the immediate financial hit was relatively small. But China is arguably the company’s biggest growth market, not to mention a font of critical financial information for Bloomberg customers throughout the world.

By this point, the same reporting team was hard at work on another major China story, a profile of one of China’s richest men, Wang Jianlin, who in 2012 purchased AMC Entertainment Holdings, the second-largest theater chain in the United States. Bloomberg reporters had uncovered several ties between Wang’s conglomerate, the Dalian Wanda Group, and family members of Chinese political leaders, including an older sister of Xi Jinping, who stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars off an investment in Wanda. These connections were all the more intriguing considering that less than a year before Wang’s AMC purchase, a plenum of the Communist Party had called for an expansion of China’s “soft power and global cultural influence.” There were few better ways to aid this effort than by gaining ownership of an enormous chain of movie theaters.

But the earlier Chinese backlash had provoked profound agita at Bloomberg. In Hong Kong, salespeople accosted one of the editors of the original series in an elevator to complain. With a sensitive new story in the works, something—or someone—had to give.

The official Bloomberg stance on the Wang article is that it was shelved because the reporting wasn’t up to snuff. This is a canard. An early version of the story that Politico Magazine read is deeply reported. Jill Abramson, the editor in chief of the New York Times at the time, agrees. “The draft that I read was a really lively, probing profile of the guy,” Abramson says. “It was extremely readable. … They said it wasn’t ready for publication, but I beg to differ.”

China allies Bloomberg was off mayoring during the China scandal, but he has his own ties to Chinese powerbrokers. | AP Photo

Winkler read the Wang story in early October and started to defang it. By October 7, when the story had been fully lawyered and approved, he weighed in again, this time to gut the piece. He ordered that editors minimize ties between Wang’s company and relatives of Communist Party leaders, according to a screenshot of an email that Laurie Hays sent to several editors. He also commanded that any reference to the prize-winning reporting from the previous year be struck, as well as language about the Communist Party possibly influencing the global movie industry, despite the plenum’s soft power declaration.

Hays summed up the logic in her email: “we can’t write about Chinese politics or we violate the license.” Strictly speaking, the license Bloomberg News has from the Chinese government to distribute financial news and data within China places no specific restrictions on what Bloomberg can cover, according to multiple sources. But Hays and another editor, Jonathan Kaufman, who earlier had positive raves for the story, did an about-face and continued to revise and soften it.

“Bottom line: The story wasn’t ready for publication,” Hays told me.

It didn’t look that way in Hong Kong, where the reporters’ only remaining task was to send letters to people named in the story to give them a chance to respond. As the team faxed the first one to Xi Jinping’s sister, an editor rushed over and told them to stop. After two more weeks of rising anxiety, the editors in New York called to break the bad news: The story wasn’t going to run at all.

During the call, Hays and Kaufman insisted that the story wasn’t really newsworthy or interesting, while exasperated Asia editors Ben Richardson and Peter Hirschberg gently pushed back, according to a transcript from the call obtained by Politico Magazine.

Hays: “You know, relatives connected to the party and stuff—it feels very much like last year’s story, and we’re somewhat beating a dead horse there.”

Richardson: “This isn’t last year’s story where it’s all inside China. This is them going overseas. It is important that we try and hold the company to some kind of accountability, some degree of transparency.”

The back-and-forth continued like that, with Hays and Kaufman insisting that the story isn’t really groundbreaking and Richardson and Hirshberg defending its merits. Kaufman eventually said he had hoped the story would have made “bigger” connections. “Bigger than the president’s family?” Richardson asked.

After the earlier backlash, Bloomberg had worked diligently to repair relations with the Chinese. The company had Kissinger Associates, Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm, on retainer and deployed it to broker a rapprochement. Other China experts also provided advice on how to manage the fallout. Among them, informally, was Hank Paulson, the former secretary of the Treasury and the subject of a laudatory Josh Tyrangiel-produced Bloomberg documentary in 2013. Paulson, who sits on the board of Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropy, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, has a good relationship with members of the Chinese government, and offered Doctoroff some insight. On September 5, 2013, a few days before Bloomberg reporters had delivered the first draft of their story to editors in New York, Paulson also met with Wang Jianlin. By then, Bloomberg reporters had “made a nuisance of themselves” with Wang’s shareholders, according to Richardson. Asked about the Wang meeting, a spokeswoman for Paulson said, “They did not discuss Bloomberg.”

In the end, Hays delivered the final word on the conference call with the editors in Asia: “You can tell [the writers], bad news, the story’s been shelved, and we’ll discuss it in the morning.”

When reporters Mike Forsythe and Shai Oster learned of the decision, they demanded a conference call with Winkler. Forsythe set his voice recorder by the speaker. Winkler explained that if Bloomberg published the story, the company would be kicked out of China. Then he brought up Nazis. He’d been reading about Nazi Germany and how reporters made concessions to work within the Third Reich. Bloomberg would have to operate similarly in China. To an extent, the company already did, by tagging sensitive stories with a “code 204” to prevent them from appearing on terminals in China. But the upshot was clear: Unless they carried the promise of a Pulitzer, stories that might seriously damage Bloomberg’s China business should not be pursued. A few days later, headquarters spiked another article, about the children of prominent Chinese officials employed at foreign banks.

Business had trumped influence. The terminal had won. Despite Winkler’s explosive temperament, you almost had to feel bad for him. News was his life. In The Bloomberg Way, he describes the origin myth of his news service in 1990, which began after Winkler, then a bonds reporter for the Wall Street Journal, interviewed Bloomberg about his startup. A month later, Bloomberg called Winkler and told him he wanted to start a news organization and have Winkler run it. Before saying yes, Winkler tested the moneyman’s ethics. What if, Winkler asked Bloomberg, you had just published a story about the chairman of your biggest customer being crooked? And what if a PR person told you to kill the story or your customer would return all the Bloomberg terminals it rented? “What would you do?” Winkler asked.

“Go with the story,” Bloomberg said.

Winkler had gone with the story many times before. But in China, he failed to live up to his own ethical standard.

***

Bloomberg himself had been off mayoring during the China scandal, but his presence loomed throughout the debacle. He had his own connections to Chinese powerbrokers, including Lu Wei, a propaganda minister and the Internet czar in charge of China’s Great Firewall. Less than two months before leaving office, Bloomberg declared that his first order of private-sector business would be to visit China to “give some speeches on behalf of the company.” One overarching rule existed at that company—a commandment, if you will, that never needed to be written down. It was simply known: Don’t jeopardize the terminal. Sometimes the impure thing had to be done to protect the important thing, the money. That was also The Bloomberg Way—and the man himself was upfront about it.

What has never circulated beyond company walls is that Mike Bloomberg himself defended the China capitulation as forcefully as anyone in the organization. On January 28, 2014, during his first town hall meeting after returning to the company, Doctoroff asked Bloomberg about the China coverage. He responded defensively: “If a country gives you the license to do something with certain restrictions, you have two choices: You either accept the license and do it that way, or you don’t do business there. … The thing that hurt me the most is that some people tried to make this into something that we should be ashamed of, and we have nothing to be ashamed of. … There are things that the press shouldn’t be doing and can’t. … And I think [as for] the ethics of Bloomberg News, we have zero to be apologetic for.”

By then, the New York Times had run an article about how Bloomberg News had killed the Wang story under apparent pressure from the Chinese government. The article even had a few lines about Nazis. The company quickly suspended Forsythe, who later landed a job at the Times.

In Asia, Bloomberg was now seen as woefully compromised. Both the company and Winkler were lampooned in videos by Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, with one depicting Winkler erasing “accuracy” on a board and replacing it with “acquiesce.” And Bloomberg had erased Winkler, according one former editor. “This was the biggest scandal of Bloomberg’s history,” the editor says. “Winkler was completely absent. … Nobody wanted him out there as a frontman.”

Among Bloomberg executives and editors, it was left to Chairman Peter Grauer to explain the company’s thinking. In March 2014, he spoke to the Asia Society in Hong Kong: “We have about 50 journalists in the market, primarily writing stories about the local business and economic environment,” Grauer said, according to an account in the Columbia Journalism Review. “You’re all aware that, every once in a while, we wander a little bit away from that and write stories that we probably … should have rethought.”

Grauer also told the Hong Kong bureau that the company’s sales team had done a “heroic job” repairing relations with Chinese officials after the Xi Jinping story had run. He warned that the company would “be straight back in the shitbox” in China if “we were to do anything like that again.”

In February of this year, after everything, Bloomberg did end up running a Wang profile. The story is about the billionaire becoming a player in Hollywood after his AMC purchase, but it takes a while to get to the point. It begins instead on Wang’s private jet, to which a Bloomberg reporter clearly had access, as it descends on a bleak Chinese town. Wang, you see, is on a philanthropic mission to lift his countrymen out of poverty. At one point, he “surreptitiously” slips a wad of cash to his personal assistant with instructions to give it to a needy farmer. Wang is also allowed to mention that his business has suffered because he would not pay bribes. According to multiple sources familiar with the story, members of the editorial team tried to insert information about the connections between Wang’s company and the families of the Communist Party elite. It was stripped out by editors higher up the food chain. None of the reporting by Forsythe and Oster appears in the piece.

“They have set an awful, awful precedent,” says David Schlesinger, the former editor in chief of Reuters and former chairman of Thomson Reuters China. “Now everyone is caught in a bad situation.”

***

The battle for Bloomberg’s soul—the struggle between the impulses of The Mayor and the needs of The Owner—was even more intense closer to home. Bloomberg’s nearly 200-person Washington bureau had been in turmoil since well before the China fiasco. Some date the downturn to 2012, when Al Hunt, a respected Wall Street Journal vet who had been running the office, moved—some say he was sidelined—into a new role writing columns for Bloomberg View. Hunt had put together a formidable team of journalists and had the credentials and backbone to stand up to goofy requests from New York. After he stepped aside, the D.C. bureau began shedding talent. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Julianna Goldman, Mike Tackett and, later, Lisa Lerer and Annie Linskey were some of the well-regarded reporters and editors who left while a carousel of replacements for Hunt were undermined or outmatched by higher-ups in New York. The debut of the flashy politics vertical only made matters worse.

Palace intrigue anecdotes from inside Bloomberg often take on the feel of lore after circulating enough. One such anecdote, relayed to Politico Magazine by multiple sources, involves Justin Smith, who first arrived at Bloomberg in 2013 to organize the influence offensive. Smith, as the story goes, presented Bloomberg with some ideas that made sense, if you were running a less-prodigal media business. Smith suggested turning the money-bleeding consumer media ventures into profit centers. He talked about cutting costs, taking down Businessweek’s rate base (the guaranteed circulation used to set ad prices) and making the magazine a biweekly. He floated axing Bloomberg TV. But the owner, who was still The Mayor then, sniffed.

“I don’t care if there’s only one person in the world who watches Bloomberg TV and I’m the only one,” he said, according to one former executive. (A Bloomberg spokesperson, who refused to speak on the record, also declined to ask Mike Bloomberg whether he would confirm the quote.)

Did Bloomberg look like a guy who couldn’t stand to lose a few? Hell, he’d once given his top political aides bonuses in the mid to high six figures. In City Hall! Money didn’t matter to him, except when it did. Come back with another plan, The Mayor said. And Bloomberg Williamsburg would.

Smith had previously been at the Atlantic, where he expanded an events business and took a revered journalism brand with a dull website and made it better with Quartz, the Atlantic Wire and other products. He and Tyrangiel returned to The Mayor with expensive ideas for tech and luxury verticals. They wanted to redo the website. Tyrangiel would helm a TV makeover.

The Businessweek editor had another idea, too. He would launch—like a rocket—a flashy new politics vertical conceived by Doctoroff and filled with punchy takes on important issues. The idea was to do horse-race journalism for a non-terminal audience and let the Washington bureau burp out coverage on the Fed, regulatory issues, economic indicators and other less sexy subjects in the traditional Bloomberg wheelhouse. He would hire the biggest names he could find and, by so doing, turn politics into a proving ground in the battle between Mike Bloomberg’s needs and wants. Washington would be the first big experiment.

There’s the one where the H’s play Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots with Orrin Hatch. Or the Golden Globes, where they ambushed Hollywood folk with political questions.

In October 2014, Bloomberg Politics launched with plenty of fanfare, mainly because the high-profile writers hired to run it, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, the Game Change co-authors, each commanded a reported annual salary of at least $1 million. Given Bloomberg’s resources, the new venture had the potential to make an impact, despite the saturated landscape of political coverage, which included competition from other wire services, major newspapers, TV networks, websites like Politico—and Bloomberg’s own Washington bureau.

Halperin, Heilemann and Tyrangiel would run Bloomberg Politics out of New York, which would require a very long digit to keep a finger on the pulse of the capital. In D.C., the small Bloomberg Politics outpost segregated itself in the newsroom, while Tyrangiel froze out some of the most talented Bloomberg News staffers, according to multiple sources. In Tyrangiel’s thinking, he was addressing a widely acknowledged problem in D.C. and the company at large, which had developed a reputation as a retirement home where Wall Street Journal veterans went to live out their twilight years with fat salaries and cushy jobs. Bloomberg had layers of sedentary editors, enabled by terminal largesse. This deadwood needed to go. The way Tyrangiel set about clearing it caused the inevitable strife and chaos.

“He just had zero respect for Bloomberg News,” says one former editor at the wire service. “There was a lot of good will, and Josh and Justin burned that.” As another source put it, the “new people spit on the old people.”

Soon enough, there were people spitting from all sides. In New York, Laurie Hays, who was positioning herself to replace Winkler as the head of Bloomberg News, had identified Tyrangiel, who had Bloomberg’s ear and had been promoted to run all content for the company’s consumer media, as a dangerous rival. The tension played out in ugly fashion in Washington, where Hays was trying to annex territory. Unable to control Bloomberg Politics, she tried to undermine it, say sources. “She told people in this bureau, ‘Don’t cooperate with them,’” says one Washington staffer. (Hays disputes this. “Everybody knows I wanted the Washington bureau and Bloomberg Politics to work together,” she says. “Anything to the contrary is ridiculous.”)

Open In New Window Click here to see the episode of "With All Due Respect" where Heilemann and Halperin play Rock 'em Sock 'em robots with Orrin Hatch.

Nowhere has this tug-of-war between influence and terminal, between Washington and New York, and between the sundry egos vying for power within the company played out more garishly than with the 5 p.m. TV show hosted by Halperin and Heilemann, sometimes known as H & H, or the H’s. The show is called “With All Due Respect,” and it is afforded very little respect of its own in Washington, despite boasting the street cred of having an opening score composed by a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. (Bloomberg notes that the show has interviewed 15 presidential candidates so far and that the Politics site’s reporters have broken news on insider aspects of the campaign ranging from staff hires to fundraising and strategy.) Every source who brought up the show with me had a favorite cringe-making moment. There’s the one where the H’s play Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots with Orrin Hatch. Or the time they ask Mitt Romney to identify all his grandchildren in a photo. Or the embarrassment of the Golden Globes, where the H’s ambushed bewildered Hollywood folk to pepper them with political questions. Richard Linklater, the director of Boyhood, couldn’t help but smirk. “I hope you get some political insights from the Golden Globe carpet,” he told them.

What Bloomberg is trying to accomplish with this show, hatched by Tyrangiel as the political cousin of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” is unclear. The company refurbished an expensive studio in New York and funds a costly roadshow the H’s take to weedy events such as the Iowa Ag Summit, where they do live-streams that few people in Washington even know exist. In April, they live-streamed an event everyone knows about—the White House Correspondents Dinner. It did not go well. The wooden Halperin battered interview subjects with the fact that he only wears Armani to such fetes because the designer “lives in my building.” Meanwhile, the 6-foot-5-inch Heilemann told diminutive former NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, “I didn’t realize how short you are.” In a gratuitously zany attempt to add a pop cultural lacquer to the show, the H’s conscripted NBA Hall of Famer and Knicks color commentator Walt Frazier to co-host. “What are you wearing tonight?” Frazier asked guests again and again, smiling sadly.

In May, Halperin ended up apologizing to Texas Senator Ted Cruz following an interview where Halperin asked Cruz about his Cuban “identity,” peppering him with questions, like what type of Cuban food did the presidential candidate like? Then he finished the interview by asking Cruz to welcome his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders to the presidential race, adding, “I’d like you to do it, if you would, en español.” (Cruz later said “the apology was unnecessary—no offense was taken, nor, I believe, intended.”) Meanwhile, Heilemann went six months without having a story run under his byline on the Bloomberg Politics website, from mid-October to mid-April, despite his online reporting being a selling point of the launch.

It’s no surprise that many in Bloomberg’s Washington bureau view the glitzy New York operation with contempt. Earlier this year, Jonathan Allen, the D.C. bureau chief, quit his prestigious post after being jerked around by Bloomberg Williamsburg. “Jon Allen has never been in favor with Tyrangiel and that crew,” says a Bloomberg News staffer in D.C. Having written a book on Hillary Clinton, Allen joined Bloomberg with the understanding that he would cover her presidential campaign. But Tyrangiel had other ideas, according to multiple sources, having hired two different people for that assignment. Allen, formerly Politico’s White House bureau chief, left to become the chief political correspondent for Vox.

The problems in D.C. went public recently when a memo by a senior writer in Washington, written in response to a request from New York for suggestions on how to fix the bureau, leaked to outside media. The memo describes a “climate of fear” and a “leadership void” and includes a bevy of complaints from Bloomberg News employees in Washington. The journalists said they feel disrespected and neglected by New York and Bloomberg Politics, don’t receive clear instructions on assignments and have to fight through too many redundancies and layers of management. They worry that standards of accuracy and writing are lower for the Politics site. They also wind up competing with their own company, resulting in lame blunders. One example: being tardy to publish a story about Hillary Clinton announcing her presidential candidacy because the web team told Bloomberg News editors to back off.

Perhaps the most troubling complaint in the memo is the last one. It describes how managers in the bureau, most of them white men, subtly “exclude or adversely impact women,” leaving them off distribution lists, failing to invite them to important meetings and being dismissive in general. “Almost ALL of the political writers who were demoted and/or driven out were women,” the memo states. Indeed, many of the women who acted as sources for this story complained about misogyny at Bloomberg, whether in Washington or elsewhere.

“It’s a brofest of white dudes,” one source says of Bloomberg Politics.

***

It was a somber little cake under the circumstances. February 6, 2015, was Matt Winkler’s last day overseeing the newsroom of the media machine he’d brought to life. Bloomberg News had celebrated its 25th anniversary the previous day. On that occasion, Bloomberg tweeted out a tribute photo of himself and Winkler, holding a red glass “pilon” that the company awards to mark years of service. Now, The Owner was out of town. Winkler’s going-away gathering was a quiet contrast to the launch party earlier that week for Bloomberg Business, the splashy new website from the Bloomberg Williamsburg team. The site merged Bloomberg News online, Businessweek.com, Bloomberg TV and data-driven graphics into a creative, cacophonous portal that inspired both oohs and aahs and several ughs. That party, hosted in the sixth-floor lobby of the New York headquarters, a space called “the Link” because it connects the east and west sides of the horseshoe-shaped building, featured high-end nibbles and three open bars serving top-shelf liquor. Guests received party favors, including a choice of socks, perfume, gloves or soap, among other items, on the way out.

Winkler wasn’t completely going away. Bloomberg seemed to be keeping him close, allowing him to feel involved. Let Winkler write about data and bigfoot on major interviews with luminaries such as Elon Musk and the New York Fed chief. Give him a new title—editor in chief emeritus—a way to offer advice on important stories.

Still, Winkler had no idea Bloomberg had made up his mind about a replacement. The old news chief talked like he would be at the company forever. But his time on the throne was up.

Everyone knew the Economist was Bloomberg’s favorite magazine. No bylines. One voice. A stylish publication that resolved data points into elegant conclusions. The human enemy subjugated with panache. The magazine satisfied The Mayor and The Owner. And why just read a magazine like that when the oligarch could buy the guy who ran it? So he had. John Micklethwait had only managed a staff of about 100, but he looked like a sound hire for Bloomberg, a banker-turned-journalist with a gracious temperament and an aptitude for intelligently packaging important stories. But could he change DNA? Did Bloomberg even want that? He wasn’t merely putting Micklethwait in charge of Bloomberg News. He was making him boss of all media, including Tyrangiel’s shop. Winkler never had such an explicit mandate.

It’s possible that Bloomberg finally recognized the dysfunction in his company—that he saw how the various parts were working at cross-purposes—and empowered someone to restore order. But skeptics abound. Many employees describe Mike Bloomberg’s management style as putting “cats in a bag” to see which will emerge alive. In a December 2013 Fortune article, the metaphor called for “five cats in a bag.” In a story this year in the New York Post, it was “six cats.” One source suggested to Politico Magazine that the number of cats is irrelevant. The point is not for a cat to emerge. The point is for Mike Bloomberg to have cats in a bag. Until they are all dead. “Then he just gets a new bag of cats,” the source said.

So is Micklethwait just another tom?

Bloomberg made his decision in secretive fashion. Nobody had known. Not Winkler. Not Laurie Hays. Not Justin Smith. When the memo went out to the whole company, Bloomberg newsrooms fell silent in shock. Bloomberg News was Matt Winkler. In January, Bloomberg took care of Hays. She had just confirmed her reservation to Davos when The Owner told her she was done. He did it the nice way, according to a personal friend of Hays, asking for her resignation and explaining that he didn’t think she would fit in when Micklethwait arrived in a few weeks. She protested. He insisted.

Bloomberg Williamsburg had won, or so it seemed. Micklethwait was closer in taste to Tyrangiel than to Bloomberg News. Indeed, the Englishman started sending out style memos that were strikingly different from “Matt’s notes” and communicated that the time for writerly liberation was nigh. Enough with the dependent clauses when you introduce companies, Micklethwait wrote in one memo. Instead of identifying Apple as the “world’s largest computer company based in Cupertino, California” or some such, writers need no longer be Bloomberg Way literalists, he decreed. Apple would be just fine.

Soon enough, Micklethwait got on a conference call with the D.C. bureau and joked that he could fix a lot of things but didn’t know whether he could fix Washington, D.C. He would at least try to fix the company. In March, he announced the creation of a three-person “editorial management committee” to oversee all Bloomberg media content. The committee included Micklethwait, Tyrangiel and Reto Gregori, the deputy editor in chief of Bloomberg News, and would ostensibly unite consumer-facing media and terminal content—influence and business together, if it were possible. Tyrangiel would serve as chief content officer for editorial, tasked with focusing on long-form journalism. Micklethwait had both elevated and contained Tyrangiel, who would soon have another duty—to clean up the mess he’d helped create in D.C. He would have to do it alongside Marty Schenker, a respected Bloomberg News veteran.

Another reshuffling in April followed a similar tack. Micklethwait installed accomplished Bloomberg News editors in important positions within TV, radio and digital—consumer-facing divisions previously controlled by Bloomberg Williamsburg. The new boss was consolidating power in a way that might better integrate the company and would certainly allow him to keep an eye on the kids.

And then it happened, one last croak from Winkler: a Pulitzer Prize. In April, after 25 years, Bloomberg News finally won the big trophy. “What took you so fucking long?” Bloomberg teased him before Winkler addressed the New York newsroom, where 1,000 flutes were filled with champagne. Winkler paid homage to The Owner and defended his own legacy. “All of the elements that go into the Bloomberg Way culminated with this series,” he said.

Yet it was Micklethwait who emceed the bittersweet ceremony, admitting that he deserved no credit for the award. Which he didn’t. Of the numerous editors who did, Winkler had been reduced; Hays was gone; John Brecher, who oversaw enterprise reporting, had recently quit. The hard news heads who remained saw the irony: In this moment of victory, Bloomberg seemed to be retreating from a bottom-up approach to enterprise and investigative work that Hays, in particular, had tried to encourage and that allowed Zachary Mider’s winning series to emerge from his beat reporting.

But now Bloomberg himself was back. The Mayor had morphed once again into The Owner, and The Owner had thrown himself into the business with gusto. He’d spent the first month examining the news operation and media products, thinking about ways to distribute content and maximize impact. He’d been hands-on. The time stamp had returned.

Along with it came an editorial course correction that no amount of self-deprecating British humor and liberating memos from Micklethwait could quite disguise. Multiple insiders confirmed to me that Bloomberg would now focus less on big projects that might win awards but get little traction on the terminal—no lengthy investigations into, say, education in India—and more on content for the core audience, whether it be of the market-moving data-nugget variety or more ambitiously reported pieces about the financial realm. It remains to be seen just exactly where the new Bloomberg Politics parody sports-style game show starring political reporters covering campaigns fits in.

Many employees describe Mike Bloomberg’s management style as putting ‘cats in a bag’ to see which will emerge alive. So is John Micklethwait just another tom?

What the change means for the mission to project Bloomberg influence into the world is also murky. The first major sortie of that sort, Bloomberg Politics, caused such trauma in Washington that harmonizing it with the news bureau will be difficult. In April, the vertical got suckered into posting a phony endorsement of Hillary Clinton by Nancy Reagan, an item the Bloomberg News speed desk had already flagged as a hoax. The internal controls worked. Tyrangiel’s team bypassed them. Mark Halperin was responsible for another blooper this past January, when he posted a story predicting that Mitt Romney would announce a third run at the White House—only to have Romney announce just the opposite a few hours later.

And what would happen when another situation like China came up and Micklethwait had to answer to the star around which Bloomberg’s galaxy revolved? In late April, the New York Times published Mike Forsythe’s Wang Jianlin story, which benefited from additional reporting but wasn’t so different from the version Bloomberg claimed wasn’t fit to run in 2013. For now, anyway, the company is clearly back in the good graces of China. The visas are being restored. Terminal sales continue apace. Bloomberg reporters are even being allowed to ask questions at tightly controlled government press conferences.

To stay solvent today, almost every media outlet strikes a devil’s bargain with its business model, some more offensive than others. (BuzzFeed, for instance, has deleted posts that big advertisers object to.) The difference with Bloomberg is that its news service doesn’t merely grapple with that questionable compact—it was born from it. Bloomberg News was created to fuel the sun, not to be sustained by it in virtuous orbit. That is a tension that may never be resolved, a gap between business and influence, Owner and Mayor, a conflict inherent in the DNA of the company created in Mike Bloomberg’s image.

Mark Lennihan/AP

Which is why everything at Bloomberg, ultimately, begins and ends with what is going on in the black box of a billionaire’s brain. It has always been thus. Bloomberg is, as many of his employees told me, a brainy, unpredictable, sometimes irrational actor driven by ego. He has never been able to let the media professionals take over.

“It’s a failing of Mike Bloomberg to resolve what he knows and what he likes,” says a former Bloomberg staffer. “That’s why Bloomberg media is going through this existential crisis.”

That crisis may continue as long as he runs a company so wrapped up in his enigmatic desires. What does he want for his sprawling, chaotic, secretive media kingdom?

“Bloomberg is always about the promise of Bloomberg and what it could be,” says another former staffer.

Of course, only one person knows the answer to that riddle.

And Mike Bloomberg could not be reached for comment.