Here’s a story of Bloomberg for all the traders and finance enthusiasts,
The Bloomberg Terminal sits on every trading desk in the world, yours too. Yet you can’t buy a single share of the company behind it.
Here’s the real story.
In 1981, Michael Bloomberg got pushed out of Salomon Brothers with a $10 million settlement. He used it to build a terminal that tracked market data, alongside Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan, and Charles Zegar. Merrill Lynch bought in for $30M in 1984. Then Bloomberg spent the next 25 years buying himself back out - first a third of Merrill’s stake in 1996, then the rest for $4.43 billion in 2008.
Today: no IPO, no shareholders. Bloomberg owns the bulk of it himself.
What that freedom bought him: he ran New York City as Mayor for over a decade while barely touching day-to-day operations with no board pushing back, no stock being dropped. The company kept compounding anyway, now doing an estimated $12-13 billion a year with 350,000+ terminals in use.
And what staying private let them build: a terminal business so entrenched it became the industry’s default language, an entire news and media division, philanthropic capital that funds Bloomberg’s causes independent of any board approval, and a company that by recent estimates does $12–13 billion in annual revenue with over 350,000 terminals in use, without ever having to justify a single one of those numbers to a public shareholder.
Just one tool, built so well that an entire industry organized itself around it and the only way to own a piece of it is if Michael Bloomberg decides to sell it to you himself.
Here’s where it gets interesting for us.
You can’t buy Bloomberg. But you can buy MSCI, S&P Global, or FactSet — all pitched as “the next best thing to Bloomberg” MSCI’s own filings name Bloomberg as a direct competitor in Index and Analytics. FactSet calls Bloomberg its most formidable rival.
But competitor doesn’t mean substitute. S&P Global’s biggest business is market data but indexes are only 12% of its revenue. MSCI’s real moat is benchmark licensing baked into fund mandates, not real-time terminal data. FactSet competes for smaller buy-side desks, a different budget line than Bloomberg’s bulge-bracket seats.
So an investor buying MSCI for “Bloomberg exposure” is actually buying a licensing annuity business with a completely different engine. Not wrong to own, just the wrong reason.
That’s the real research trap: when you can’t buy the company you want, are you checking if the substitute is built the same way or just buying the nearest ticker with familiar buzzwords?