The billionaire chuckled; he’d already pulled two bills from his wallet. He put them in the basket—another few bucks toward what must be a record for the largest amount of money spent in the shortest amount of time with the least to show for it. Bloomberg spent $500 million in 16 weeks, and dropped out less than 12 hours after polls closed on Super Tuesday, the first time he was on the ballot.

Why, when you’ve got $60 billion and you’re a 78-year-old Jew, would you spend so much of your Sunday sitting in church in Alabama? Because reaching out to voters, especially in a historically and emotionally important place like Selma, is what running for president demands. So Bloomberg did it, even though that meant sitting silently while the hometown congresswoman, Terri Sewell, looked out at the congregation and said that Biden isn’t rich, but he’d “earned” his spot in the church.

Remember one month ago, after the Iowa caucus collapsed, and Biden’s campaign was trying to explain how coming in a distant fourth there wasn’t a problem, and neither was coming in fifth in New Hampshire? The Bloomberg campaign was putting together the kind of on-the-ground operations pitched to potential hires as “Think about getting to do everything you’ve ever wanted to in a campaign.” Then Biden won South Carolina, a single state that he was always expected to win (though he won by a margin larger than he had dared hope), and the chin-strokers and anti–Bernie Sanders panickers instantly transformed Biden into a juggernaut.

It was enough. By the time Bloomberg took his seat in the pew, his top aides and most prominent supporters had started to realize that the implosion of his campaign couldn’t be stopped. It’s like Bloomberg was playing blackjack with a 16—maybe good enough to win, but he was still nervously waiting to see what the dealer flipped over. That was the optimistic take.

Most of Bloomberg’s campaign was a tight operation, complete with the former police detail he hired as private security (they wore earpieces and green lapel pins with eagle heads on them to help look the part of the Secret Service, which isn’t protecting any of the Democratic candidates yet). A veteran of both Clintons’ campaigns, whose company has mastered everything, down to the lighting that makes even iPhone pictures look good, ran logistics. But the Selma visit was a mess. Instead of anyone organizing the four presidential candidates and thousands of people in attendance ready to re-create the 1965 walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there was just a man shouting half-directions into a megaphone and another standing in front of those waiting to march doing an uncanny impersonation of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech. Bloomberg’s staff walked him to a spot at the front of the crowd that they thought had been set aside for him. But it hadn’t been. Biden had left, Sanders was never scheduled to come, and Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar were jammed together halfway down the block where they were supposed to be. A woman trying to take control chased after Bloomberg and his team: “This is not the line!” she said. “This is not the front of the line!”