Michael Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg founded Bloomberg LP in 1981, the financial data and media company that became the indispensable infrastructure of global capital markets and that has made him one of the twenty wealthiest people on earth with a net worth exceeding $100 billion. Born February 14, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, Bloomberg graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and Harvard Business School in 1966 before spending fifteen years at Salomon Brothers, where he was made a general partner. After being laid off in a merger in 1981, he invested $10 million of severance pay into the company that became Bloomberg LP. He served as the 108th Mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013 — three terms, the last achieved by overturning term limits — managing a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.

Bloomberg's relationship with Israel reflects both personal Jewish identity and institutional conviction about New York's connection to the Jewish state. As mayor, he led multiple trade and diplomatic delegations to Israel, maintained robust city-to-city institutional ties, and was an outspoken defender of Israel's right to defend itself during the Second Lebanon War and the Gaza operations of his mayoralty. He was one of the first prominent politicians to visit Israel following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, arriving in Tel Aviv in solidarity and meeting with senior Israeli government officials. He has been a consistent donor to Israeli universities and research institutions through Bloomberg Philanthropies, and has funded the Bloomberg School of Public Health's partnerships with Israeli medical research centers.

Bloomberg's political history is complex — he served as a Republican mayor, became an independent, and ran briefly as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, spending over $1 billion on his campaign before withdrawing. What has remained consistent across these political identities is his support for Israel, which he has described as rooted in his Jewish heritage and in his view that democratic allies deserve American solidarity. His media empire, Bloomberg News, maintains significant coverage of Israeli economic and political developments. At Rank 43, Bloomberg represents the self-made Jewish billionaire whose support for Israel spans the political spectrum: consistent, publicly declared, and backed by the financial scale to make that support meaningful across institutional and personal dimensions.