Bloomberg’s VERY expensive debate performance

Michael Bloomberg has spent an astonishing $464 million on his presidential campaign — which he launched just 10 weeks ago, as he noted on the debate stage Wednesday night.

That debate was the major debut of Bloomberg’s presidential campaign — and he came off a bit rusty. His debate performance has been widely panned. Bloomberg has spent the most money of anyone on that stage, and he spoke the least, coming in at 13 minutes and 6 seconds, just behind Joe Biden.

Let’s do a little math (Andrew Yang-style) on how much Bloomberg’s campaign spent to appear onstage:

$464 million (thanks to Bloomberg campaign’s filing released Thursday) ÷ 13 minutes and 6 seconds (or 786 seconds) of speaking time = $590,330.78 per second. That works out to $35,419,847 per minute!

The wild thing about Bloomberg is that his success basically has nothing to do with his debate performance (unlike fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, who advertised, in part, to get ON stage). Bloomberg has so much money that he can use his own preferred platforms to get his message out the way he wants to, through paid media, rather than the traditional earned media methods, like sit-down interviews and town halls, where he’d face tougher scrutiny.

The irony, of course, is that had Bloomberg gotten more tough questions ahead of Wednesday night’s debate, he might have better handled the queries about his record of alleged sexist comments, stop-and-frisk or his wealth.

Bloomberg arguably doesn’t need the debates — he’s risen in the polls on his own accord and isn’t doing any fundraising anyway. It also helps that the Democratic National Committee scrapped its donor requirements, opening the door to Bloomberg’s debate debut.

And despite Bloomberg’s poor performance, his well-paid campaign has already cut a video of him in the debate, misrepresenting his opponents and making him look better than he actually was. Classy!

The Point: Bloomberg has spent a LOT of money on this campaign so far. But that didn’t get him very far on Wednesday night’s debate stage.