Mike Bloomberg spent the past 10 weeks flooding the airwaves with ads, racking up endorsements and climbing into contention ahead of his Super Tuesday debut. And in two hours Wednesday night, he risked losing those swift gains as he stumbled through his first nationally televised primary debate.

He was rusty. He was testy. He was out of touch. And, for a candidate often shielded by the scripted one-liners of killer campaign advisers, he was on his own — unable to hide his peevish demeanor and unable to portray himself, as his campaign has tried to do, as the clear choice to stop Bernie Sanders and beat Donald Trump.

Bloomberg emerged so diminished that the other billionaire Democrat in the race — who failed to qualify for Wednesday's debate stage — stepped in wielding a platinum dagger.

“One lesson from tonight,” Tom Steyer concluded of the evening, “looks like Mike Bloomberg might be running in the wrong primary.”

During Bloomberg’s debut on the Democratic debate stage, the former New York City mayor fielded attacks from every candidate over his past embrace of Republicans, ardent defense of capitalism and stop-and-frisk policing tactic.

In one particularly tense exchange, Warren grilled him over the corporate culture at his Manhattan-based financial news services company, Bloomberg L.P., in light of allegations he made derogatory remarks toward women who are now barred from discussing the comments by non-disclosure agreements.

When asked during the debate about his past remarks, including allegedly telling a former female employee, “I would do you in a second,” Bloomberg deflected. He said he has “no tolerance for the kind of behavior that the ‘Me, Too’ movement has exposed” and pivoted to an accounting of the numerous women he’s empowered at his company and as mayor.

“I hope you heard what his defense was. ‘I’ve been nice to some women.’ That just doesn’t cut it,” Warren said in response. “The mayor has to stand on his record. And what we need to know is exactly what’s lurking out there.”

She demanded he say whether he would “release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements, so we can hear their side of the story” and repeatedly asked him how many such agreements exist.

He insisted there are “very few,” but wouldn’t specify beyond that, and added that he was never personally accused of any wrongdoing, “other than maybe they didn’t like a joke I told.”

In the end, Bloomberg would not agree to release the women from the legal agreements.

"You know you are a winner when you are drawing attacks from all the candidates. Everyone came to destroy Mike tonight. It didn’t happen. Everyone wanted him to lose his cool. He didn't do it. He was the grown-up in the room,” his campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey said after the debate ended. He said Bloomberg “was just warming up” and hinted he would do better at the next debate in South Carolina on Tuesday.

But that rosy review of Bloomberg's performance was in the minority. The former New York mayor seemed annoyed and exasperated at several points: He shrugged and snapped when justifying his personal fortune and defended his elite financial status, saying, “I worked very hard for it.”

In perhaps Bloomberg’s best moment, he pointed out that Sanders, the self-avowed democratic socialist, owns three homes. But he undermined his cause by offering a dubious excuse for why he hasn’t released his tax returns yet, a lack of transparency that allowed opponents to liken him to Trump.

“The number of pages will probably be in the thousands of pages. I can't go to TurboTax,” Bloomberg said, unintentionally highlighting the gulf between a person of his extreme wealth and the average American.

His comment that, “fortunately I make a lot of money” quickly turned into a social media meme.

On his embrace of stop-and-frisk, Bloomberg stopped short of offering his past contrition, admitting he felt “embarrassed” about how it turned out. “We have to keep a lid on crime,” he said. “But we cannot go out and stop people indiscriminately.”

The feeble approach allowed Biden to take a swing. “It's not whether he apologized or not. The policy was abhorrent. And it was a fact of violation of every right people have,” he said.

Bloomberg reiterated his apology, and tried to turn the attack back onto Biden, who led the push on the 1994 Crime Bill, and even Sanders, who voted for it. But his answer lacked specifics and came off as buck-passing and excuse-making.

“There is no great answer to a lot of these problems,” he led off his answer.

Warren seized on that, saying he hasn’t issued a “real apology” for a policy that was deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge, who just hours before the debate happened to write an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “I Was the Judge in the Stop and Frisk Case. I Don't Think Bloomberg is Racist.”

Bloomberg also wasn’t able to turn the animated face-off into the general election fight he’s hungering for. He drew a contrast with Trump by admonishing his decision to drop out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, but spent most of the night slinging mud in the primary fight he’d been flying above thus far.

During a tit-for-tat with Sanders over whether workers should be able to sit on corporate boards, Bloomberg replied, “Absolutely not. I can’t think of a ways that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation.”