How much of Bloomberg’s fortune was gotten from monitoring his customers?

Virtually all the major financial institutions use Bloomberg terminals.  I say virtually all because it’s possible that there may be a hold-out, but Bloomberg is indispensable to the financial world.  It now appears that the Bloomberg sales force, the guys at the bottom of the information pyramid, has access to their customer’s usage patterns and could see what they were doing.  How much more can the top guy find out about what his customers are doing? 

For people who are not in the financial industry an explantion is in order.  The Bloomberg system is like Google, Bing, Facebook and the telephone company combined.  It’s a vast data base for people who want to look up statistics and financial facts.  But it’s also a communications network that allows Bloomberg’s customer to make trades.  The people who run the Bloomberg System can monitor this, and Michael Bloomberg is at the top of that system.  The Week:

"At Bloomberg, omniscience is a feature, not a bug." Monitoring terminal users' data has long been part of an obsession with controlling and using all available data at the company, where "stalking is simply part of the culture." Employees can keep tabs on each other, checking when someone scans — or "badges" — out of an office, and management is said to log every keystroke to track staff and outside customers. That Bloomberg culture explains how hundreds of people at the company could spy on customers "without batting an eye." In fact, this suddenly "inexcusable" practice highlights a key to Bloomberg's phenomenal success. "Data comes into the company — as much as possible, from wherever possible — but it doesn't leave because, at Bloomberg, information is money."

Being able to know what a huge hedge fund manager, the traders at Goldman Sachs or the guys at the Federal Reserve are doing before they even do (log every keystroke) it is a huge advantage if someone wanted to use that information to make money.

Of course he’s not supposed to do that. 

Of course the IRS is not supposed to attack conservative groups as a way of silencing opposition to Obama, the Holder Justice Department is not supposed to spy on reporters, and the mainstream media is not supposed to be blatantly partisan, but that’s the way it is. 

Glenn Reynolds has remarked that   “In the Obama era, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid. It’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”

I never questioned that the information that the Bloomberg terminal I was using would be misused.  The fact is that my inquiries were plain vanilla and I did not trade on the system.  But questions about the misuse of any data base are no longer related to the tin-foil-hat crowd.  So the question occurs to people who are getting very suspicious about spying and corruption: were all of the billions Michael Bloomberg accumulated just  due to the rental fees on his terminals or was some part based on the illicit use of the system he created; a system that made it possible for him to spy on his customers?  In the Obama era that question can no longer be dismissed.