Just six metres below the City of London's newest building, the 1.3 billion USD European headquarters of the financial data and media giant Bloomberg, lie the newly restored and faithfully reconstructed remains of one of London's very oldest buildings: a Roman temple dedicated to a virile, bull-slaying young deity called Mithras. There is, these remains seem to suggest, no rule that says cities, cultures and civilisations will inevitably endure.
So I ask Michael Rubens Bloomberg, the company's founder and chief executive, whether, as Donald Trump's America cools on free trade and international alliances and Britain prepares to quit the European Union, the Anglo-Saxon civilisation might also be facing decline. Somewhat to my consternation, he suggests it may be. "I think it's very worrisome," he says as we sit in a large, open-plan office on the building's sixth floor. "We are in a world where because of technology you have to interact with everybody else, and if you try to cut yourself off it's really hard to see how you can thrive."
Warming to the theme, he tells me he has recently returned from China, where people are proud of their country. "I really am worried about it. I don't want to take anything away from China, but they are ascending, and it's hard to argue that western Europe, including the UK, and North America, particularly the US, are doing the same thing." Over our hour-long conversation he laments the breakdown of bipartisanship in America, the lack of civility in public discourse, the disparagement of experts, the pervading culture of blame and the amount of time people spend "playing Angry Birds on their iPhones rather than communicating".
Bloomberg is short, dapper, courteous and in remarkably good shape for a man of 75. Hours before our mid-morning interview, he flew overnight from New York to Luton in his Falcon jet, freshened up at his house in Cadogan Square, then took the Tube from Sloane Square to preside over the Mithraeum's opening ceremony. Laid off by Salomon Brothers in 1981, he has since amassed a 48 billion USD fortune by providing the financial world with instant market data on Bloomberg terminals. Yet he has few airs and graces, keeps no private office, and insists that even the lowliest of his 19,000 employees call him Mike.
He was also a very successful, three-term centrist mayor of New York, running in turn as a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent. Over the 12 years that began in January 2002, he helped the Big Apple recover from the 9/11 attacks, steered it through the financial crash of 2008, turned its budget deficit into a surplus and made it one of America's safest and cleanest cities. Critics noted that he raised property taxes and backed a stop-and-frisk policy that disproportionately targeted minorities, but he also declared war on trans-fats, smoking and fizzy drinks, and accepted a salary of just 1 USD a year.
Today, Bloomberg has a new role. He is the Anti-Trump. In the absence of an obvious Democratic standard-bearer, he has become the unofficial leader of the opposition, using his wealth to resist the policies of a president he has called a con man and dangerous demagogue. He is everything his fellow New York billionaire is not: a globalist, environmentalist, free trader and supporter of immigration, gun controls, same-sex marriage and abortion rights. He refuses even to call Trump a businessman, insisting he is a real-estate developer who has never managed more than five people and is worth scarcely a quarter of the 10 billion USD he claims.
As for the UK, he says he is saddened by its direction. Far from creating a "Global Britain", he says it is "going in exactly the opposite direction. If I had a country and 45 per cent of my exports went to one entity, in this case the EU, I would spend a lot of time caring for and feeding that relationship." It will be the disgruntled blue-collar workers who voted to leave who suffer most, he argues. "In the name of those in need we always find a way to screw them."
Inevitably, the conversation turns to his own presidential ambitions. He was frequently mentioned as a possible candidate in 2008 and 2012, and for Governor of New York in 2010, but declined each time. In 2016 he assembled campaign staff and even made commercials before concluding that the electoral rules made it impossible for an independent to win. But what about 2020, and the Democratic nomination? The two-time grandfather would be 78 by then, though his mother lived to 102 and he still skis, pilots planes and sometimes flies from New York to London and back in a single day.
He opposes Trump's policies "violently", his word, and is already deploying his fortune to resist them: rallying governors and mayors behind the Paris climate accord, campaigning to close coal-fired power stations, financing the gun-control lobby and taking on the tobacco industry. He has spent roughly 5 billion USD on philanthropic causes, more than Trump's entire worth. "I'm thinking about running for president of my block association," is his first, deflecting answer when I press him on 2020. But finally he opens the door just enough to make clear he has not ruled out a "Battle of the Billionaires" next time round. "If God came and said, 'Would you like the job?' I would think it's a wonderful opportunity to change the world."
