Michael Bloomberg, a former stock trader at Salomon Brothers and eventual mayor of New York City, designed a machine that would allow users to get data on virtually any security in the world in seconds, turning its creator into a billionaire. The Nasdaq Stock Market, which provided entirely electronic transactions, as opposed to the lumbering humans at the New York Stock Exchange, made it quicker and cheaper to buy and sell stocks around the globe. The entire global financial system became synced into a push-button electronic matrix of unfathomable complexity. Money turned digital.
