Reasons to Love New York 2014 - Bloomberg’s Retirement Timeline - New York Magazine

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19. Because This Is Michael Bloomberg’s Idea of Retirement


24 days after leaving office: Bloomberg heads to Washington to pressure Republican lawmakers to overhaul immigration laws.

30 days: The U.N. announces that Bloomberg will become special envoy for cities and climate change.

105 days: Bloomberg says he will allocate $50 million in 2014 toward combating the NRA.

142 days: Bloomberg accepts the first-ever Genesis Prize, a million-dollar endowment honoring �Jewish values.� He uses the money to offer prizes of $100,000 each to entrepreneurs ages 20 to 36.

149 days: Bloomberg gives the commencement address at Harvard. �Don’t you just hate it when alumni put their names all over everything? I was thinking about that this morning as I walked into the Bloomberg Center on the Harvard Business School campus across the river.�

165 days: While yachting on the Bosporus, Bloomberg is joined by public-health officials to celebrate his �successful campaign to decrease smoking in Turkey. He wonders aloud if his philanthropy might win him a �Nobel Prize.

246 days: Though the former mayor had been attending 7:30 a.m. editorial meetings and working full days at Bloomberg headquarters since January, in September CEO Daniel Doctoroff resigns so that Bloomberg can run the company again.

278 days: Queen Elizabeth II grants Bloomberg honorary knighthood. Though he can’t be called �sir� as an American, he can now be referred to as Michael Rubens Bloomberg, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

300 days: For Bill Gates’s 59th birthday, Bloomberg makes a birthday card using Microsoft Paint and presents it to him via Twitter. It depicts the two billionaires in birthday hats, sharing an oversize cupcake.

308 days: Bloomberg donates $657,000 to a Berkeley campaign that would impose a one-cent-an-ounce tax on sugary drinks. The measure passes, making it the nation’s first soda tax.

308 1/2 days: He buys up over 400 domain names, including BloombergIsAShortJew.nyc, MichaelBloombergIsTooShortToBePresident.nyc, GetALifeMike.nyc, and, of course, BloombergBlows.nyc. Then, after the press �uncovers the purchases, he releases the domain names.