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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.