Michael Bloomberg has been named New York’s richest person again.
Forbes’ 2026 richest-person-in-every-state list, published this week, puts the New York resident’s estimated fortune at $94.9 billion, with Bloomberg LP as the source of his wealth.
The number is large, but the way he got there is the more interesting part.
Bloomberg was fired from a Wall Street job at 39 and started over the next day with an idea most people expected to fail.
Here’s the fascinating story behind the businessman who keeps topping the list year in, year out.
Who is Michael Bloomberg?
Bloomberg was born in 1942 and grew up in a middle-class home in Medford, Massachusetts.
He studied electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he paid his tuition with loans and a summer job as a parking lot attendant. He then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1966.
That same year, Salomon Brothers hired him as an entry-level trading room clerk on Wall Street.
He moved up through equity trading and sales and later oversaw the firm’s information systems.
The firing that changed everything
In 1981, Salomon was acquired by Phibro Corp., and Bloomberg was let go after 15 years.
Harvard Business School’s profile quotes him describing it as being fired at 39 from the only full-time job he’d ever had.
The exit came with a $10 million buyout of his partnership stake, and according to Britannica, that money helped fund the financial data company he started in 1982, then called Innovative Market Systems.
Other biographies give a 1981 launch date and a smaller $300,000 starting investment, so the exact founding date and seed figure vary by source.
The idea was to give people in finance the information they needed on their own desktops, and it was renamed Bloomberg L.P. in 1986.
According to HBS, the company reached 10,000 customers in its first decade, and the firm now employs about 25,000 people in 120 countries.
How big is the fortune now?
Forbes’ profile of Bloomberg says he owns 88% of Bloomberg LP, which has estimated annual revenues of nearly $15 billion. It also notes that he served as New York City mayor from 2002 to 2013.
On the Forbes 400, he ranks 16th in the country at age 84. And according to Patch, he is of course the richest person in New York City too, among 54 city billionaires worth a combined $722.2 billion.
Where the money is going
Bloomberg is also one of the country’s biggest philanthropists. Bloomberg Philanthropies says he has given away $25.4 billion over his lifetime, including $4.3 billion in 2025 alone.
Much of that has gone to his alma mater. He gave Johns Hopkins $1.8 billion in 2018 for undergraduate financial aid, which let the school commit to need-blind admissions.
In 2024, he followed with $1 billion to make medical school free for most students.
Who else made Forbes’ list?
The 2026 list has some changes beyond New York.
Forbes says eight states have new people at the top, and it found billionaires in 46 states, down from 47 last year.
- Nevada: Sergey Brin, at $265 billion, replaced casino heiress Miriam Adelson after buying a $42 million home on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.
- New Mexico: Former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, at $4.4 billion, topped the state after returning from a two-year term as U.S. ambassador to Kenya.
- New Hampshire: Palantir’s Alex Karp edged out Rick Cohen, $22.1 billion to $21.8 billion.
- Georgia: Home Depot cofounder Arthur Blank passed the Chick-fil-A founder’s heirs, $12.8 billion to $12 billion each.
- Idaho: Margaret “Peggy” Baker overtook Frank VandeSloot after Medline’s 2025 IPO.
Some states are less well-known.
The richest people in Alaska, Delaware and West Virginia are still centimillionaires. West Virginia’s top spot goes to Intuit’s former CEO Brad Smith at $700 million. South Dakota has no clear answer, since longtime richest resident T. Denny Sanford died in July 2025. Forbes is asking readers for tips on his successor.
Bloomberg’s tri-state neighbors on the list include Connecticut’s Steve Cohen ($26.7 billion), New Jersey’s Peter Kellogg ($5.8 billion) and Pennsylvania’s Jeff Yass ($77.8 billion).
Among the biggest fortunes, Elon Musk in Texas is listed at $1 trillion, Jeff Bezos in Florida at $381 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg in California at $246 billion.
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