And now, for the main event…

One of the more interesting parlor games on Wall Street these days is predicting what billionaire Michael Bloomberg, now 83 years old, is going to one day do with Bloomberg L.P., his invaluable financial data and news service. Yes, Bloomberg is in great shape, and his mother famously lived to be 102. But for octogenarians, estate planning is always a relevant topic, especially when your net worth is estimated at more than $109 billion, according to Forbes.

That estimate may be a bit light, but who knows? Bloomberg L.P. is privately held and has no public debt or public filings. And Bloomberg, who owns some 88 percent of his namesake firm, is not listed on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. (Apparently, reporting on the boss is a conflict of interest.) If he were, he’d be nestled comfortably somewhere among the top 20 wealthiest people in the world, perhaps between Mukesh Ambani and Carlos Slim. Anyway, Bloomberg L.P. is a significant entity—with some 26,000 employees and an implied valuation of around $120 billion—that hasn’t had much to say about succession. As best as I can tell, Mike last commented on his plans at a climate summit in September 2023, where he revealed that Bloomberg Philanthropies would inherit his 88 percent stake in the company. But, he added, “because of tax laws,” the foundation will “have to get rid of it” and “sell it some place or other over the first five years.” That was a pretty interesting statement, indicating for the first time that an M&A deal could be in the offing for Bloomberg L.P. one day. Mike further noted that he gives “all of the company’s profits to the foundation.” Last year, Bloomberg Philanthropies distributed a staggering $3.7 billion to charity, according to its latest annual report. The same report said that Mike, himself, had given away $21.1 billion during his lifetime. Obviously, if the foundation were ever to sell Bloomberg L.P., buyers would be lining up around the block. Could competitor Thomson Reuters, with a market cap of $73 billion, make an offer? Or S&P Global, with a market cap of almost $150 billion? Would any members of the trillion-dollar club—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet—be interested? Nothing would surprise me, especially since Bloomberg L.P. is truly sui generis. Back in October 2020, the omnipresent billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman suggested that his (now defunct) SPAC, Tontine Holdings, could buy a minority stake in Bloomberg L.P., probably as a prelude to an Ackman-sponsored liquidity event down the road. But Bloomberg L.P. quickly doused Ackman’s ambitions. “The company is not for sale in any form,” it said at the time. Patti Harris, Mike’s longtime colleague and former deputy mayor, is the C.E.O. of Bloomberg Philanthropies. Presumably it will be her job, in consultation with its blue-chip board of trustees—which includes Hank Paulson, Dan Doctoroff, Walter Isaacson, Maya Lin, Ken Chenault, and Ruth Porat, plus Mike’s two daughters, Emma and Georgina—to figure out how to sell Bloomberg L.P. when the time comes.

Obviously, a “sale” could take several forms: an I.P.O., which would be a blockbuster; taking on another minority shareholder; or a merger with, or sale to, a company that can afford to buy the whole thing. But allow me to offer another, more modest proposal—one that might keep Bloomberg L.P. private in perpetuity, while continuing to fulfill the charitable mission of Bloomberg Philanthropies. Why not structure something similar to what Amar Bose contrived two years before his death in July 2013, at age 83?

Bose, the founder of the eponymous Bose Corporation, was also a self-made entrepreneur. And he was utterly unconventional. “I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs,” he told Popular Science in a rare 2004 interview. “But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.” Bose was anxious that his hugely successful Massachusetts company—which manufactures all sorts of audio devices, from loudspeakers to soundbars to noise-cancelling headphones—remain private in perpetuity. So he made the unusual decision of bequeathing his roughly 90 percent stake in the business to M.I.T., his alma mater, with the stipulation that the university could never monetize the stock in any way, ever. No I.P.O. No M&A deals. No merger with an Ackman SPAC. Nothing. At the time, Bose Corporation was probably worth around $10 billion, making Amar’s gift one of the single largest donations ever to a university. Of course, M.I.T.'s fiduciaries might have been inclined to monetize the stock and create some sort of multiplier effect on value, as only an I.P.O. or a sale to a third party could provide. But that option, as Amar decreed, was off the table. M.I.T. can’t even add the value of the Bose stock into its endowment calculations. The good news for M.I.T.: Bose Corporation pays annual dividends of roughly $25 million. The university has no role in operating or managing the company, and does not have a seat on Bose’s board of directors, but the annual dividend has supported all sorts of potentially groundbreaking research under the aegis of the Bose Fellows program. Recent projects funded include bringing magnetic resonance imaging to primary care; searching for dark matter in the form of primordial black holes; and using light to rejuvenate the brain and restore vision. Just last month, along with Brown, Penn, Dartmouth, the University of Virginia, and others, M.I.T. refused to sign the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which called for universities to commit to “using lawful force if necessary” to quell campus protests, among other Trumpian measures, in exchange for privileged access to federal funds. Meanwhile, those Bose dividends have helped M.I.T. fund its out-of-the-box projects despite this White House’s coast-to-coast crackdown on pretty much anything that increases America’s storehouse of scientific knowledge. Could Mike do the same thing at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins, whose research programs have been cut to the bone by the Trump onslaught? (If not Johns Hopkins, Mike is welcome to give the stock in Bloomberg, plus any dividends, to my alma mater, Duke.) Mike is already the largest single donor to the school. His first gift—$5—came in 1965, the year after he graduated. Since then, by my count, his gifts to the university have totaled $4.55 billion, including $1 billion just last year. If Bloomberg Philanthropies decided to go the Bose-to-M.I.T. route, the gift would be, by far, the single largest gift ever to a university. If, say, the stock paid dividends equal to $50 million a year, in perpetuity, you can only imagine how far that money would go to further research projects. In the end, I suppose it depends on what Mike’s priorities are. He may not mind if Bloomberg L.P. goes public or gets sold after he’s gone. In that case, a lump sum in excess of $100 billion given to Bloomberg Philanthropies, under Patti Harris’s leadership, could have a massive impact around the world. After all, if Bloomberg Philanthropies is required to give away 5 percent of its corpus every year—as most private foundations are—then 5 percent of $100 billion, or $5 billion annually, could go very far indeed. But it would require a monetization event to realize that kind of valuation. If Mike prefers keeping his company private, in perpetuity, the Bose model might be just the solution.

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