By Isabelle Bousquette

A battle of insults and threats has broken out between the tech world and Wall Street.

What's got everyone so worked up? The same thing that starts most fights: business software.

A series of social-media posts went viral in recent days with claims that AI has created a worthy -- and way cheaper -- alternative to the Bloomberg terminal, a computer system that is like oxygen to professional investors.

Now "Bloomberg is cooked," some posters argued as they heralded the arrival of a newly released AI tool from startup Perplexity.

Most people would be thrilled by the prospect of a tool that promises to do for $2,400 a year what they currently pay $30,000 a year to get. Not Wall Street.

Traders and investment research teams have a sacred bond with the Bloomberg terminal, which they use to track and analyze real-time and historical pricing for a variety of asset classes, execute and record trades, and chat with customers and peers through one of its most popular features, Instant Bloomberg.

Some have met their spouses on its chat feature. Others say they spend more time with it than they do their spouse. At least one commissioned a wedding cake in the shape of it. It is a status symbol, rite of passage and phantom limb wrapped into one.

So it was perhaps no surprise that the Bloomberg doomsayers were met with a spirited and decisive backlash from a devoted fan-base who would rather resort to physical violence than let go of their personal and professional security blanket. The finance bros who worship at the altar of Bloomberg have declared war on the tech evangelists who have put all their faith in AI.

To suggest that the terminal is replaceable is "laughable," said Jason Lemire, who jumped into the conversation on LinkedIn. (Ironically or not, his post also included an AI-generated image of churchgoers praying to the Bloomberg terminal).

"It seems quite obvious to me that those propagating that post are either just looking for easy engagement and/or have never worked in a serious financial institution," he wrote.

Bloomberg defenders questioned the original posters' sanity and experience. Some went as far as suggesting they turn themselves into the police for their egregious assertions. Others invoked memes of Penn Jillette, the comedian known for his docuseries, "Bullshit!"

But the vibe coders wouldn't be swayed, accusing the critics of "pearl clutching" and ignorance over the vast promise of AI.

"There's a definite naiveté," Tom Fry, who built trading software at Morgan Stanley before co-founding AI startup Agentcy, said about the finance community's response. "Everything is disruptible."

This has been an ongoing refrain from the tech community in recent weeks as vibe-coding tools in products like Claude Code and the newly released Perplexity Computer pledge to help companies re-create cheaper versions of popular software systems.

But when they came for Bloomberg, something was different.

Many in the Bloomberg camp claimed the original posters were paid by Perplexity to orchestrate the campaign and weren't properly disclosing it.

Perplexity has denied this, saying the conversation was 100% organic. The firm's goal was never to go head-to-head with Bloomberg, said Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko.

But he said he wasn't surprised to see the conversation there take off. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas had written in 2024 about developing "the friendly UI and affordable Bloomberg terminal for the masses," in an X post that drew its own fair amount of polarized responses.

Bloomberg has beaten back a long line of competitors since it launched in 1982 to become the de facto leader in the market data space and in recent years has even been embedding its own AI features.

Morgan Linton, the co-founder and CTO of AI startup Bold Metrics and an avid Perplexity Computer user, said it's rare for a single AI prompt to generate anything close to what Bloomberg does. That said, he added that tools like this can lay "a really good foundation for a financial application. And that really has not been possible before."

Others aren't so sure.

Michael Terry, an institutional investment manager who used the terminal for more than 30 years, said he used a prompt circulating online to try to vibe code a Bloomberg replica on Anthropic's Claude.

"It was laughable at best, horrific at worst," he said.

Shevelenko acknowledged there are some aspects of the terminal that can't be replicated with vibe coding, including some of Bloomberg's proprietary data inputs.

The live chat network, which includes 350,000 financial professionals in 184 countries, would also be hard to re-create, as well as the terminal's data security, reliability and robust support system.

"I love Bloomberg. And I know most people that use Bloomberg are very, very loyal and extremely happy," said Lemire. His message to the techies? "There's nothing that you can vibe code in a weekend or even like over the course of a year that's going to come anywhere close."

Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 17, 2026 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)

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