The Revolutionary

"Did you win?" I asked him.

"Well," Bloomberg re-plied, smiling, "I'm alive and I don't know about him."

In the late 1940s, Bloomberg's father was asked to go to a convention in Miami Beach, Fla. It was a big deal for the senior Bloomberg. "My mother went to the library to get books on conventions—how to dress, what you say, how to check into a hotel—literally," says Bloomberg. "And he came back, and my mother insisted that we wait dinner for him. My father told us that when he got to Miami Beach, he went to check into the hotel and they said, 'Bloomberg, that's a Jewish name, isn't it?' He said yes, and they said, 'We don't allow Jews here.' And somebody made a fuss and got him in."

I asked Bloomberg whether a sense of insecurity in the broader world—the prospect that there might be people like the developer, or the kid he had the fight with, or the hotel clerk out there—helped explain his drive to succeed. He demurred. "I thought where you were going with this was that 'you have an inferiority complex where you had to be better.' I don't think I have that."

I pressed again: do you think the potential feeling of being different, or seen as different, is part of why you want to succeed? "You know, it may be nice for your story for me to say that I feel different, but I don't …"

But did you, back then?