“Many New Yorkers have an eerie feeling now that Mike’s money is literally everywhere and that a city, said to be for sale in the era of the big-time bosses, has actually been bought by a mayor so much bigger than they ever boasted of being. The richest man in New York is also, for the first time, the mayor of the city and one of its grandest philanthropists, making it almost impossible for the rest of us to talk to him without wondering at some level of consciousness: ‘Can I get a slice of this guy?’ His personal and public outlays have flooded the city’s bloodstream for years now, and few are so uninterested in a possible transfusion of their own that they will take him on.”
—From “The Transformation of Mike Bloomberg,” November 19, 2008