How Much Did Merrill Lynch Make From Investing in Bloomberg?

David Senra, reading Bloomberg by Bloomberg, says Merrill Lynch turned a $30 million stake in Bloomberg into about $4.6 billion. Merrill was the first customer and the first major investor. In 1982 it bought 30 percent of the company for $30 million. Around 1996 Michael Bloomberg bought back 10 percent of that stake for $200 million. About ten years later, in 2008, he bought the remaining 20 percent Merrill still owned for $4.4 billion.

The same firm shaped the product. Two traders at Merrill told the team what had to be fixed so the terminal would be useful to them, and a product that worked for those two could work for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people like them. When the system was first installed, Merrill assigned the traders to work with Bloomberg. They were demanding and fair. When something did not work, they could show that it did not, and under what circumstances, so the system got better every day those problems were fixed.