Former Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg addresses his staff and the media after announcing that he will be ending his campaign on March 04, 2020 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
Billionaire and former presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg has invested over $20 million in his own digital tech company weeks after he dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary.
The $20 million investiture went to Hawkfish on March 31 through Bloomberg’s campaign, according to a new Federal Election Commission filing. That disbursement was for “digital advertising” but the Bloomberg campaign had already ended by then and his team was in the process of moving on from a disappointing run for president. Another $1.5 million was spent on Hawkfish on that same day for “digital advertising.” Bloomberg officially dropped out of the race on March 4 after entirely funding the campaign.
The massive sum is on top of the $45 million the campaign spent on Hawkfish’s services throughout the firm’s work for its founder Bloomberg, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The eight-figure spend by Bloomberg in March shows that Hawkfish has a ton of financial reserves that could be of help to any campaign that signs up for its services.
Bloomberg, a billionaire with a net worth of $54 billion, seems to have disappeared from the scene after transferring $18 million to the Democratic National Committee and walking away from having his own outside entity help the apparent party nominee in Joe Biden. He ended up laying off his staff who were placed in key battleground states in the wake of his withdrawal in March.
A person close to Bloomberg in the business community, who declined to be named in order to speak freely, recently told CNBC that the former New York mayor is still disappointed in the way his campaign panned out after spending just over $1 billion of his own money, and he’s not yet ready to get back into the public eye of taking on President Donald Trump. Party donors have been privately hoping that Bloomberg gets more involved sooner rather than later as Trump, along with the Republican National Committee, has an extensive war chest that they’ve been building for years.
A spokesman for Bloomberg declined to comment.
