Michael R. Bloomberg was upset. He had indulged too much over the holiday season and lost his standing bet with a friend at the end of the year. Both try to meet a set weight limit every six weeks.

But Bloomberg, who somehow manages to be ruthlessly competitive and relentlessly good-natured at the same time, had a plan.

With the next weigh-in coming up, Bloomberg was sure his 5 a.m. 45-minute runs around New York's Central Park and what he calls "a starvation diet" meant that he had met his 169-pound target. He sent his friend a big cake. Had his secretary drop by with a box of chocolates. He chuckled as he told the story. He smelled victory.

Bloomberg's competitiveness has made him an exceedingly wealthy man -- his net worth is estimated at $1 billion -- but he is now almost as well-known for giving away his money as for amassing it.

One of the world's major players in financial news and information, he entered the top ranks of philanthropists nationally last year when a $45 million donation to the Johns Hopkins University pushed his total gifts to his alma mater to more than $100 million.

Gifts by Bloomberg -- who chairs the school's board of trustees and runs its current fund-raising campaign -- amount to almost 10 percent of that drive's goal of $1.2 billion.

Other gifts by him to Hopkins have built a physics building, endowed a professorship in history of art and altered the formula for undergraduate financial aid.

"Michael Bloomberg has proven his ability to make and donate extraordinary amounts of money," said Steven Muller, who was Hopkins president when Bloomberg joined the board. "But he didn't buy his chairmanship of the board of trustees. This is one smart man who has made a real difference in the whole operation of the university."

So it's no stretch to say that Hopkins' modern history might have been vastly different if Bloomberg hadn't taken a summer jobwhile in high school at an electronics company not far from his home in Medford, Mass. He told a woman there -- "I think her name was Carol Kohn" -- that he wanted to be a physicist.

"She told me to go to Johns Hopkins because of the Applied Physics Laboratory," he says, referring to the Howard County facility then under exclusive contract to the Navy. "Of course undergraduates had nothing to do with it, but I didn't know that."

The man who turned out to be Hopkins' biggest donor arrived in Baltimore in 1960. "I had never seen the campus before," he says.

Following father's example

The school's history also might have been different if Bloomberg hadn't grown up watching his father write a check for $50 or $100 to the Associated Jewish Charities every year. "He would give anonymously," Bloomberg recalls. "But when their report came out every year, he would look down the list and point to some names next to amounts and say, 'He could have given more than that.' "

Bloomberg also remembers his father writing out another check every year, for $25 to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "I asked him why, and he said if they can get away with discriminating against the Negro, as was said in those days, then they could discriminate against the Jews as well," Bloomberg says.

'A blue-collar life'

Those amounts were significant for an bookkeeper in a small dairy. "It was a white-collar job, but we really lived a blue-collar life," Bloomberg says.

Hopkins' tuition, tiny by today's standards -- $1,200 in 1960 -- was a stretch for the Bloomberg family, especially after his father died in his junior year and his mother took on secretarial work. Bloomberg took out loans and had a job.

"I sat in the faculty club parking lot from from 4 to 7 p.m., five nights a week, sometimes under an umbrella, doing my homework," he says. "My job was to keep the night-school students from parking in the club lot. Usually they wouldn't even try when they saw someone was sitting there. For this I was paid $35 a week and got dinner in the kitchen of the club. It was one of the best jobs I ever had."

That experience reverberates in his donations to Hopkins. Large amounts have been designated for undergraduate financial aid.

"I just listened to what [university President William R.] Brody kept telling me, that the number-one need is financial aid," Bloomberg says. "If we want the best students, we have to make it affordable for them to come."

He has also sent significant sums to Hopkins' School of Public Health. "I don't think they get as much attention, in part because they do so much of their work in Third World countries, helping poor people," he says.

Bloomberg, who earned a Hopkins engineering degree, describes himself as a C student there. "Hopkins taught me how to think," he says. "It certainly didn't teach me how to be an electrical engineer. Even God couldn't have done that. But I did learn how to use the scientific method, to think consistently.

"I also learned how to deal with people. I was president of my fraternity, and I put on dances, things like that. I fooled around a lot."

Bloomberg says he did hit the books the first semester of his senior year: "Those were the grades the grad schools looked at. I got all A's and one B."

That was good enough to get into Harvard Business School. Bloomberg says he planned to go to the Army's Officer Candidate School after that, and then probably on to Vietnam. But he was rejected because of his flat feet.

He assumed he would find a career that used his engineering education, but a friend suggested Wall Street, so he went to Salomon Brothers in 1966. His quick mind and salesman's flair served him well. He was made a partner -- essentially one of the firm's owners -- at the age of 31.

But his brash personality did not suit all. He was farmed out to Salomon's computer operation and, when the firm was sold in 1981, asked to leave.

For Bloomberg, those two moves turned out to be the equivalent of being thrown into the brier patch of folk tale fame.

He took his share of the Salomon sale proceeds -- about $20 million -- and his knowledge of how computers could supply financial firms with information many were still looking up by hand and started his new company. It is now a dominant force in financial news and information worldwide.

While at Salomon, Bloomberg met fellow Hopkins alumnus Morris W. Offit. "There weren't many people from Hopkins on Wall Street," Offit remembers. "So we talked."

Then Hopkins president Muller, looking for a relationship with Wall Street, recruited Offit for the board of trustees in 1973. Offit eventually became board chairman and got Bloomberg to join in 1987.

Bloomberg was no pennant-waving, can't-miss-a-lacrosse-game alumnus. Hopkins was where he went to school -- no more, no less. But he returned to the campus as his wealth was reaching extraordinary levels and, unlike many in that position, he had no desire to accumulate and hold on to a pile of money bigger than the next mogul's.

"I suppose some people get satisfaction out of that," he says. "I think it's pretty stupid. I like the things that money can buy as much as the next person, but there is a limit to how much of that you can do.

"And I think I get as much or more pleasure out of seeing my name on a building or a scholarship or something like that," he says.

"Besides, it's good for business," he adds, arguing that Microsoft founder Bill Gates would not be having his antitrust troubles with the U.S. Justice Department if he had molded a better image earlier by giving away some of his billions.

And he chides fabulously wealthy investor Warren Buffett for saying all his donations are in his will. "A cynic could say that he'll be dead, so what does he care," Bloomberg says. "I'm sure he's going to do the right thing, but you should give it away while you're alive and can have some influence on how it is spent."

Hopkins provided an ideal target for Bloomberg's philanthropic aims. "I knew it was a good school, but before I got involved I didn't realize how far it reaches. It affects people around the world. Hopkins does so much, but it is still a manageable size. You really feel that you can make a difference here."

Other causes

Bloomberg has other causes. He donated a building at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where his elder daughter -- he is amicably divorced -- goes to school. Various museums and cultural institutions in New York have received gifts, including a jazz series at Lincoln Center.

"I would like to get a lot of kids exposed to some decent music instead of that rap stuff," he says. "I think it's a little healthier for them."

Bloomberg claims he actually is not all that competitive. "I'm not like some of my Type A friends who have to win everything," he says. "If I run a race, I want to do better than I did last time. When I play golf, my new hobby, I would like to it better, but I don't throw clubs."

Still, the amount of his first huge gift to Hopkins seems no coincidence -- at $55 million it was $5 million more than the $50 million gift of Baltimore investor Zanvyl Krieger that got the School of Arts and Sciences named for him.

In a 1996 interview, Krieger recalled Bloomberg had told him, "Zan, if you give that kind of money, I've got to, too."

When Bloomberg topped him by $5 million, Krieger said, "He told me: 'Now you've got to meet my gift.' "

It's the same attitude that gets him into a bet over who can meet a weight goal -- about which, by the way, Bloomberg was disappointed to report that his plan failed.

His friend did not eat the cake or the candy. "He gave them to his secretary," Bloomberg says. Both made their weight, so there was no winner.

The payoff if there had been? A healthy contribution to the other's favorite charity.

Pub Date: 3/21/99