Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, spent nearly a billion dollars on his long shot presidential bid, according to his campaign’s final financial disclosure report released Friday.
Bloomberg spent $936,225,041.67 on the campaign, which lasted roughly three months. More than half of that total was spent in the month of February — roughly $470 million. He had more than $60 million cash on hand at the end of February.
Bloomberg jumped into the 2020 presidential race late and used his personal wealth to bankroll an unconventional campaign, which included lush salaries to an army of campaign staffers and organizers and blitzing the airwaves and the Internet with political advertisements.
He ended his bid for the Democratic nomination earlier this month after a poor showing on Super Tuesday. He picked up four delegates in American Samoa that night and 46 delegates overall.
Bloomberg’ campaign took the biggest hit at the Las Vegas debate Feb. 19, his first of the cycle, in which Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., laced into him over his past critical statements about women — calling him “a billionaire who calls women 'fat broads' and 'horse-faced lesbians'” — before demanding on the spot that he release the women making the allegations against him from their nondisclosure agreements. He later announced he had released the women from those agreements.
When he ended his campaign, Bloomberg, however, vowed to stay in the fight in an attempt to defeat President Donald Trump in November and use his massive campaign apparatus and former campaign staffers to work to elect whomever the party selects to face Trump.
“After yesterday’s results, the delegate math has become virtually impossible — and a viable path to the nomination no longer exists," Bloomberg said at the time. "But I remain clear-eyed about my overriding objective: victory in November. Not for me, but for our country. And so while I will not be the nominee, I will not walk away from the most important political fight of my life."
Bloomberg said defeating Trump means supporting former Vice President Joe Biden, the current front-runner.
