The News
It’s Michael, not Walter, thank you.
“If anyone didn’t know that Walter Bloomberg is not associated with Bloomberg, they must’ve been living under a rock,” Reto Gregori, the polished deputy editor who runs Bloomberg’s newsroom day-to-day, told me during an interview at Bloomberg’s spaceship-like headquarters on Friday.
It was a wild — and, one infuriatingly-named X account aside, exuberant — week here at Bloomberg, which has built a true media empire out of its utilitarian terminal business over the last 35 years.
Though Gregori was too polite to point it out, Bloomberg’s main rivals — the financial broadcaster CNBC and the global wire service Reuters, which picked up the CNBC report, in an ouroboros of aggregation — had fallen for a “Walter Bloomberg” post. The post, shared around 10 a.m. on Monday, claimed, apparently out of thin air, that Trump would pause the tariffs that had just crushed global markets. The fracas sparked some $2.5 trillion worth of market moves, as investors reacted to what they (or some automatic models) assumed was a genuine Bloomberg scoop.
Normally, “Walter” is a mild nuisance for Bloomberg. The company has at times tried fruitlessly to find the owner of the account, an ALL CAPS financial news aggregator that often posts Bloomberg Terminal headlines and coasts on Bloomberg’s name to juice engagement, and revoke their terminal access. (A Bloomberg spokesperson declined to comment on this.) But in 2025, someone like “Walter” can shake Wall Street.
The real Bloomberg did not report on the discussions of a pause until Trump and his Cabinet actually decided to pause a day later. Gregori told Semafor that he was proud that no one in the newsroom overreacted and picked up the CNBC or Reuters alerts without vetting them.
In a separate conversation, Stephanie Flanders, the head of economics and politics at Bloomberg, noted that this was partially the result of Bloomberg journalists’ increased skepticism of news and information circulating online. The newsroom’s “habits have just continued to get tighter and tighter on these things,” she said.
“Those continual lessons of care just kicked in.”
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Monday’s tweet and subsequent cascade of confusion came at a moment when Bloomberg was once again reveling in its place at the center of the global financial universe.
When I visited Bloomberg’s Midtown offices earlier this week, the place was humming with an energy I hadn’t seen in many newsrooms since before the pandemic. Joe Weisenthal, whose X/podcast/newsletter ubiquity won him and cohost Tracy Alloway a Vanity Fair profile last week, said he’d been among the Bloomberg reporters glued to the minute-to-minute updates, and he’d only been sleeping about four hours a night.
And Bloomberg can be a difficult place to nap: It features a “squawk box” (no relation to the CNBC morning show), from which an employee barks headlines aloud that are broadcast in audio form on the terminal.
“Normally the squawk box [goes off] like, a few times an hour,” Alloway said in an interview. On Wednesday, it sounded like “an entire conversation was going on for the full working day.”
The newsroom had been preparing for over a year for the trade war. Walking offstage after his interview with Donald Trump in October, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait knew that if the former president returned to office, global trade would be one of the biggest narratives of his second term.
Trump’s comments to Micklethwait during the interview calling tariff “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” reinforced for editors that they were right to focus on changing global politics and its impact on markets.
In recent years, the company had noticed that many of the subscribers to its expensive Bloomberg Terminals had hired geopolitics analysts and experts to monitor and project how the global realignment of politics would impact their businesses. So in early 2024, Bloomberg began assembling a team of several dozen staffers to focus specifically on geopolitics. As soon as it was clear on the evening of Nov. 5 that Trump would be returning to the White House, they got to work on predicting how his second term would impact global markets.
The company also spent years realigning its Washington coverage, what Flanders described as a movefrom a “traditional” DC newsroom that largely focused on electoral politics and Capitol Hill to one that focused more on business and policy, leveraging sourcing in the corporate world into scoops about the White House and regulatory agencies and vice-versa. The company is also in the midst of hiring a dozen more journalists to cover Washington, Gregori told Semafor.
The result, as the eyes of the world have been fixed on the US economy and the chaos in Washington around Trump’s tariff rollout, has been big stories. On Saturday, for example, Bloomberg was first to report that the Trump administration would exempt a number of goods, including smartphones, from tariffs. It also broke news on potential exporter tax credits, how the tariffs would make a new Audi virtually unsellable, Amazon canceling orders for products made in China, and more.
The company said that April 9, “Liberation Day,” was the second-largest subscriptions acquisition day ever for Bloomberg Media. April 7 brought in record viewership numbers for Bloomberg TV’s YouTube channel, both in terms of views and watch time, while Bloomberg’s permanent livestream hit an all-time high at market open last week. (The most-read story on the terminal this week was: ”‘My Bad’: Bill Ackman Lays Bare Wall Street’s Big Fail on Trump.”)
Max’s view
Bloomberg’s media efforts were for years a curious sideline to its real business, a terminal whose speed, data sources, and even keyboard shortcuts are deeply woven into the lives of traders and analysts around the world.
The company employs 3,000 journalists spread out across the globe, making it one of the world’s largest newsrooms, and its media arm — the website, plus television, events, podcasts — brings in $500 million, according to the Financial Times, a tiny slice of Bloomberg’s $12 billion in annual revenue.
When I asked Gregori how he measures the success of his newsroom, he said that web traffic is important, but that the real metric is something more like influence.
“We want to be part of the conversation,” he said. “Clicks are nice, but as you know, clicks don’t pay. We’re really focused on usage on the Terminal. … If we can be part of the mainstream conversation, that’s success.”
Room for Disagreement
Since the 1990s, Bloomberg has been seen as a prime and juicy target for disruption. “Now that golden egg — and all that it pays for — is a target for new competitors looking to knock it from its dominant position. Bloomberg has fended off competition before, but the latest upstarts are gunning for the company at a time when Wall Street is already aggressively looking to cut its spending on Bloomberg terminals,” The New York Times wrote … back in 2015. Since then, generations of would-be disruptors have come and gone, because, Alexander Campbell writes, the company is “essential financial infrastructure. More akin to a utility company providing electricity than a high-flying tech company, but one with the world’s single biggest repository of interesting micro and macro data.”
Notable
- In 2023, the New York Times reported that when founder Michael Bloomberg leaves Bloomberg, he plans on ceding his ownership stake of the company to Bloomberg Philanthropies. The organization is then likely to sell it or take the company public eventually, because of the overwhelming tax incentives to do so.