A rude word on HBO as a teenager, a change of heart in Glamour ten years later, a father whose fortune is pledged to his foundation, and a comeback at 43 that brought a 12th place and an FEI sanction.
Forbes put Michael Bloomberg’s fortune at $94.9bn on 26 October 2026, and in 2013 the man who owns it said that everything he had would go to his foundation.
$94.9bn
That is Forbes’s real-time count, and real-time counts move. The magazine’s March list placed him 18th with $109bn, so by late October he was roughly $14bn lighter on paper and still among the richest people alive. Both numbers come from the same magazine, five months apart, and the gap between them would rank as a substantial fortune on its own. Most of it rests on one asset. Forbes credits him with 88% of Bloomberg LP, the company he cofounded in 1981, and estimates its annual revenue at nearly $15bn. In 2023 he handed the chief executive’s job to Vlad Kliatchko and made Mark Carney non-executive chair.
His family’s position was set out ten years earlier, in his own words. Monte Burke of Forbes interviewed the 71-year-old mayor at City Hall in October 2013 and asked about giving the fortune away, and Bloomberg answered: “Everything I have goes to the foundation [Bloomberg Philanthropies]. My kids are taken care of.” (Forbes, 2013) He added that the company would eventually go to the foundation or be sold by it. Forbes valued him at $31bn at the time, which makes the pledge roughly three times larger now than when he made it.
Both sentences hold at once, and the second carries the weight. Bloomberg’s own company site says almost all of its profits already go into its philanthropic efforts. Beyond that, the arrangements belong to the family, and what a founder’s children actually inherit is a question most households keep behind the door. “Taken care of” is a phrase only the people taken care of can measure.
1 word
The word was “sucks”. Born Rich, the 2003 HBO documentary about the children of the very rich, caught the younger Bloomberg daughter saying that this was how the family name felt. She has since given two ages for the remark: 19, in a 2013 interview with Glamour, and 18, in a separate conversation with Manhattan Magazine. Two different ages for the same sentence is a discrepancy that matters mainly to the person who said it. Either way she was a teenager, and the line stayed with her.
It was also the year she won individual gold at the North American Young Riders’ Championships. Off camera, the name was already appearing on start lists and doing well on them.
The retraction came in November 2013. In the Glamour interview she said she regretted the line, that she had been 19 and now felt completely differently, and that “I’m proud to be a Bloomberg.” The interview appeared eight days after her father told Forbes where his money would go. Nobody has suggested the two were connected, but the calendar did put them next to each other.
Ten years is a respectable interval for changing your mind in public.
$210,000
Her career is older than the documentary. According to her own site, she began riding at four and won four medals in three appearances at the North American Young Riders’ Championships, including team gold in 2002 and individual gold in 2003.
The adult results followed in an order that suits a programme of record. Riding Juvina, she won the inaugural $210,000 Central Park Grand Prix, a CSI3*, in 2014. In 2015 she took the $127,000 Adequan Grand Prix in Wellington and, her site says, rode for the United States at the Pan American Games in Toronto, where the team won bronze. The bronze put her in a team jacket a year before the Global Champions League began, and three years before she had a team of her own to captain.
She lists three bases: New York City, North Salem in New York state, and Wellington, Florida. Anyone who follows the winter circuit will recognise the triangle without a map. The Central Park prize remains the figure most often attached to her name, which is fitting for a rider who won the city’s grand prix in the city where her father had been mayor for three terms.
1,384 starts
The FEI’s athlete page, the sport’s official record, lists her at 43 with 1,384 starts and 17 wins, roughly one win for every 81 times she has entered the ring. Its Longines ranking puts her 1082nd, on 153 points. That is the standing of a rider returning to grand prix level, which is what she is doing. A ranking built on points favours riders who have been competing steadily, and she spent the end of 2023 and the first half of 2024 away from the top level.
Haute Living said she was making a comeback at 43 in an interview published on 13 April, and a launch evening followed three days later at Estiatorio Milos in West Palm Beach. The comeback itself started earlier. Traverse City Horse Shows was already describing a return to the top level around mid-2024, after the birth of her second son in November 2023. Haute Living gives her two sons, born in 2013 and 2023.
The summer gave the comeback some figures. At Upperville, a CSI4* held from 3 to 7 June, the FEI records her 28th in the Welcome Stake on 5 June on Tulara Colmine. In July the FEI showed her entered at the Traverse City CSI3* with Cassina and Tulara Colmine. Traverse City’s results page lists Tulara Colmine’s owner as Gotham Enterprizes LLC.
1 sanction
The other figure from Upperville is less welcome. On 9 July, the Chronicle of the Horse reported that she had been included in the FEI’s Administrative Sanctions – Fast Tracks update, in a controlled-medication case involving her horse Cassina at the same 3–7 June show.
The report said Cassina had tested positive for betamethasone and that she accepted the sanction. Cassina was one of the two horses the FEI showed her entered with at Traverse City in July, the month the Chronicle reported the sanction. A season that began as a comeback story has a footnote, and the footnote is part of the record too.
3 teammates
The thing she has built for herself has a squad sheet. The Global Champions League’s rider page says she has competed on its team circuit since the league began in 2016, spent two seasons with Miami Glory and joined the New York Empire in 2018. Her own site describes the Empire as founded and captained by her, and names Scott Brash, Bertram Allen and Denis Lynch among the riders for 2026. Captaining a Scot and two Irishmen under a New York flag is a reasonably diplomatic job in itself.
The charity came first. She founded The Rider’s Closet in 2006, three years after Born Rich, and in 2019 it merged with the EQUUS Foundation. The charity therefore predates the league by ten years and the Empire by twelve. Avenue magazine reported in 2021 that she sits on the board of the Hampton Classic.
