Michael Bloomberg — politician with roots in the Russian Empire
Michael Rubens Bloomberg was born at St Elizabeth's Hospital in the Brighton neighbourhood of Boston on 14 February 1942 and grew up in Medford, Massachusetts. His father, William Henry Bloomberg, was a bookkeeper for a dairy company; his mother, Charlotte Rubens Bloomberg, was born in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Each line of his family leads back to the north-western provinces of the Russian Empire. In his own account of his family, Bloomberg writes that his father was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1906 to parents who both came from Vilna. His paternal grandmother, Rose Bernstein, arrived in 1891 at the age of twelve with her mother and four siblings, two years after her father, Gedalia. His paternal grandfather, Alexander "Elick" Bloomberg, was a rabbi; some accounts describe him as a Polish Jew, while Bloomberg places the family in Vilna.
On his mother's side, his grandfather Max Rubens, after whom he is named, came to America as a child. His parents, Cappell and Grace, left a small town near Grodno, in present-day Belarus, and lived for several years in Liverpool before crossing the Atlantic. His maternal grandmother, Ettie, was born on Mott Street in New York in 1881 to Louis and Ida Cohen, who had come from the Kovno region of present-day Lithuania; Louis Cohen had arrived in 1869. Ettie married Max Rubens in 1903.
Bloomberg studied electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1964, and took an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1966. He joined the investment bank Salomon Brothers the same year and became a general partner. When the firm was acquired in 1981 he left and founded the company that became Bloomberg L.P., built around the financial data terminal that bears his name, and he spent the next twenty years as its chairman and chief executive.
He was elected Mayor of New York City in 2001 and served three terms, from 2002 to 2013. In 2020 he sought the Democratic presidential nomination. He has served as a United Nations special envoy on climate, and in 2014 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
"Vilna to Massachusetts (paternal, 1889–1891); from near Grodno via Liverpool to New York (maternal)"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Vilna and Grodno (Lithuania, Belarus)
According to his own account of his family, his grandparents' families came from Vilna, a small town near Grodno and the Kovno region — the north-western provinces of the Russian Empire.
Paternal grandparents from Vilna (grandmother Rose Bernstein arrived in 1891); maternal grandfather Max Rubens came as a child from near Grodno by way of Liverpool; maternal great-grandparents Louis and Ida Cohen came from the Kovno region. Source: Bloomberg's own family account.
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Vilna and Grodno (Lithuania, Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.