Why I left Bloomberg

The untold story, at last.

This Substack newsletter of mine has gotten pretty popular over the years, but it didn’t start out that way. While writers like Matt Yglesias often made a big splash when they left their mainstream publications to become substackers, and got lots of subscriptions right away, I started out with very few — only 70 paid subscribers in the first week, compared to thousands for Matt.

I’ve often wondered why I didn’t make a big splash when I started my Substack. One big reason was probably that unlike Matt and most others, I didn’t quit my mainstream media job right away. I started this newsletter near the end of 2020, and I didn’t leave my corporate writing job at Bloomberg Opinion until almost a year later. Substack started out as a side gig for me, meaning that my regular audience could keep reading my stuff in the regular place.

Not immediately quitting Bloomberg also meant that the inception of my Substack didn’t become a news story in and of itself. When he left Vox, Matt talked a lot about how Vox had been suppressing his viewpoint. He even went on Rogan! That generated a lot of buzz and controversy about whether the mainstream media was censoring centrist views. In contrast, “Bloomberg writer moves his personal blog from Blogger to Substack” just doesn’t make a very compelling headline.

But in fact, I do have a story about why I eventually left Bloomberg to write for my Substack full time in late 2021, and it’s kind of an interesting one. I kept it under wraps for years, but now I finally feel comfortable sharing that story — at least, as I remember it now.

In fact, there were three reasons I left, two of which are rather mundane. The first was that in summer 2021 I developed chronic vestibular migraines, which made it hard to look at a computer screen for more than four hours a day; this forced me to choose between my hobby and my job, and I chose the former.¹

The second reason was that Bloomberg Opinion, the division of Bloomberg I worked for, had some management changes that resulted in more layers of bureaucracy being added to the writing process; pitches had to go through more layers of approval, making it much harder to maintain my normal level of output. This made Bloomberg Opinion a less attractive place to work.

Neither of those reasons are very interesting or unusual. But there was a third reason, which is that in May of 2021, I became involved in an incident between Bloomberg and the Chinese Communist Party.