Bloomberg

In nineteen eighty-one, Salomon Brothers made Michael Bloomberg redundant and handed him a severance check for ten million dollars. He was forty years old with no job offers. But he had spent fifteen years watching bond traders drown in disconnected data — prices on one screen, news on another, calculations done by hand. He used the severance to build a single machine that did all three. The first Bloomberg Terminal shipped in nineteen eighty-two. Merrill Lynch bought twenty units. The terminal cost two thousand dollars a month. It was ugly, clunky, and indispensable. A trader could pull real-time bond prices, run yield calculations, and read market news without leaving the keyboard. Within months, the traders who had terminals refused to work without them. That refusal was the business model. Traders built their workflows into Bloomberg. Models lived inside it. Years of data accumulated.