While some accepted and even enjoyed the corporate patois, it caused problems for Bloomberg more than once. In 1997, a high-profile lawsuit was filed against Bloomberg and his firm by Sekiko Sakai Garrison, a sales executive.

“Women sales personnel were encouraged by Bloomberg [and other executives] to wear sexually provocative clothing,” Garrison’s complaint says. It claims that Bloomberg regularly made comments about women employees, including “I’d fuck that in a second,” “I’d like to do that,” and “That’s a great piece of ass.” At one point in 1996, the complaint alleges, Bloomberg announced to a group of workers at a sales conference, “I would like nothing more in life than to have Sharon Stone sit on my face.”

Bloomberg’s company operated as a true cult of personality, and managers took their cues from the chief. As a result, Garrison claims, the office was replete with adolescent pranks and offensive behavior, including leaving windup sex toys on desks and giving squirting rubber breasts as a joke to a new mother at a company party. Garrison claimed she was manhandled by a male colleague, teased about her “fuck-me shoes,” and subjected to expletive-laden screaming fits thrown by her bosses.

A female sales manager who worked alongside Garrison in a more junior role describes her as someone who projected the image of a strong woman who could take care of herself. “But at the same time,” the former sales manager continues, “that’s what sex harassment is all about—one thing goes over the line, and that’s what happened.”

Garrison seems to have reached a breaking point once she got married and became pregnant. In the autumn of 1992, she alleges, Bloomberg became very angry after learning that one of his salespeople was pregnant and said, “For Christ’s sake! What the hell did you do a thing like that for?” According to the suit, in 1993, upon overhearing a saleswoman complaining about finding a nanny for her newborn, Bloomberg screamed, “It’s a fucking baby! All it does is eat and shit! It doesn’t know the difference between you and anyone else!”

In 1995, Bloomberg allegedly approached Garrison in the communal snack area and asked her about married life. Garrison relayed the news that she was pregnant. Bloomberg’s now-famous response, according to the suit, was, “Kill it...kill it!” before muttering, “Great! No. 16!” in reference to the number of women of “maternal status” who were then working for him. Garrison lasted one more day at the company and never returned. In a response to Garrison’s complaint, Bloomberg and the company denied the allegations. Then, in March 2001, on the eve of his mayoral campaign, Bloomberg issued a statement saying that he had taken a polygraph test that showed he was telling the truth when he denied Garrison’s allegations. (Bloomberg did not disclose the questions he had answered.) The company reportedly settled the lawsuit with no admission of guilt.

Around the same time, another ­sexual-harassment lawsuit was filed against Bloomberg’s company by a 28-year-old sales representative who echoed Garrison’s descriptions of Bloomberg’s office persona. According to the court file, the case was closed in February 2001. Before that point, though, Bloomberg was deposed, and excerpts from his deposition were published by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice. Bloomberg accused women who brought charges against the company and asked for damages of “extortion,” but he didn’t deny making vulgar comments in the office.

The “kill it” line was deployed in a campaign commercial by Bloomberg’s 2001 Democratic opponent, Mark Green. But the lawsuits never took hold as a political issue. He squeaked into City Hall on a tide of his own money and post-September 11 shock. As Green points out today, “When someone wins office, often it erases any allegations that preceded his candidacy, so the winner can start with a clean slate.”

As a privately held company, Bloomberg L.P. isn’t subjected to much outside scrutiny. But it is known to be a high-pressure world with a management theory based on social Darwinism. That approach is pure, unabashed Bloomberg. “We simply throw everyone interested into the deep end of the pool, as it were, and stand back,” he wrote in his memoir in 1997. “It becomes obvious very quickly who the best swimmers are.” At Salomon, he made a point of being the first to work in the morning and the last to leave at night. “I’ve never understood why everybody else doesn’t do the same thing,” he wrote.

While Bloomberg no longer runs the company, it remains the basis of his immense wealth. He created its corporate culture—the intense work hard, play hard ethic that values dedication to the firm above most other things and demands long hours in exchange for relatively generous salaries and benefits. People who work there call him Mike, and his spirit inhabits every exotic-fish tank and glass conference room in the sleek new corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

Long days and lots of face time are held sacred: Employees on the business side are typically expected to be in the office from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., depending on their job. Until this summer, when some policies were changed, the idea of working part-time was sacrilege. Former employees said that going to a doctor’s appointment—or taking a child to one—required using a vacation day, because being out of the office for an hour or two was so frowned upon. “If you left at 5 after being there since 8, it was like, ‘Oh, half a day?’ ” says the 11-year veteran of the company. “Even though I had a two-year-old and a six-month-old at home, people would say, ‘You’re leaving?’ ” (A company spokeswoman denies the existence of these rules regarding time out of the office.)

Employee hours are monitored through an I.D.-badge system that tracks people as they enter and leave the building, and computers indicate when they are idle. “Some people say, ‘Wow, that is really Big Brother,’ and that is probably part of the goal,” says a former sales employee. “But part of it is what Bloomberg prides itself on—customer service.” Indeed, when one calls a worker, customer support can usually say exactly where that person is. As another former staffer puts it, “Every moment of every day was badged.” She says that she wore a pager even when she was in the bathroom.