Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony Ballmer ( BAWL-mər; born March 24, 1956) is an American businessman and investor who was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and a co-founder of the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic investment company.

As of February 2026, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his personal wealth at around $145 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest person in the world, and the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List ranked him as the fourteenth-richest person with a net worth of $130 billion.

Ballmer was hired by Bill Gates at Microsoft in 1980, and subsequently left the MBA program at Stanford University. He eventually became president in 1998, and replaced Gates as CEO on January 13, 2000. On February 4, 2014, Ballmer retired as CEO and was replaced by Satya Nadella; Ballmer remained on Microsoft's board of directors until August 19, 2014. Under Ballmer's leadership, a 14-year period, the company tripled sales and doubled profits, but lost its market dominance and missed out on 21st-century technology trends such as the ascendance of smartphones in the forms of iPhone and Android.

Until a recent scandal, some claimed Ballmer's ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers as an improvement over previous owner Donald Sterling, citing his willingness to acquire superstar players and finance the construction of Intuit Dome.

Steven Anthony Ballmer was born on March 24, 1956, in Detroit, Michigan, as the son of Beatrice Dworkin (1920–1997) and Frederic Henry (Fritz Hans) Ballmer (1923–2000), a manager at the Ford Motor Company. Frederic was from Zuchwil, Switzerland, and arrived in the United States in 1948. Ballmer's mother was Jewish. Through his mother, Ballmer is a second cousin of actress and comedian Gilda Radner. Ballmer grew up in the community of Farmington Hills, Michigan. Ballmer also lived in Brussels from 1964 to 1967, where he attended the International School of Brussels.

In 1973, he attended college prep and engineering classes at Lawrence Technological University. He graduated as valedictorian from Detroit Country Day School, a private college preparatory school in Beverly Hills, Michigan, with a score of 800 on the mathematical section of the SAT and was a National Merit Scholar.

Ballmer, a first-generation college student, attended Harvard University, where he was a manager for the Harvard Crimson football team and a member of the Fox Club, worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates. He scored highly in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, an exam sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, scoring higher than Bill Gates. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in applied mathematics and economics in 1977.

Ballmer worked as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble for two years, where he shared an office with Jeff Immelt, who later became CEO of General Electric. After briefly trying to write screenplays in Hollywood, he started attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business for his MBA (where Mukesh Ambani was his classmate), but dropped out in 1980 to join Microsoft.

Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980, and became Microsoft's 30th employee and the first business manager hired by Gates.

Ballmer joined Microsoft with a salary of $50,000 plus 10% of the profit he generated and no equity. However, Ballmer's profit-share started to balloon out of control as Microsoft grew. When Dave Marquardt suggested for Microsoft to reorganize as a corporation instead of a private partnership, he proposed that Ballmer own 8% of the company in exchange for cancelling the profit-sharing model. Paul Allen initially disagreed, but Gates and Allen reached an agreement when Gates agreed to fund an outsized majority of Ballmer's 8% stake. When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8% of the company. In 2003, Ballmer sold 39.3 million Microsoft shares for about $955 million, reducing his ownership to 4%. The same year, he replaced Microsoft's employee stock options program.

In his first 20 years at the company, Ballmer headed several Microsoft divisions, including operations, operating systems development, and sales and support. In February 1992, he became Executive Vice President for Sales and Support. Ballmer led Microsoft's development of the .NET Framework. Ballmer was promoted to President of Microsoft in July 1998, making him the de facto number two after Gates, then chairman and CEO.

On January 13, 2000, Ballmer was officially named the chief executive officer; he would shed the title of president in February 2001. As CEO, Ballmer handled company finances and daily operations, but Gates remained chairman of the board and still retained control of the "technological vision" as chief software architect. Gates relinquished day-to-day activities when he stepped down as chief software architect in 2006, while staying on as chairman, and that gave Ballmer the autonomy needed to make major management changes at Microsoft.

When Ballmer took over as CEO, the company was fighting an antitrust lawsuit brought on by the US government and 20 states, plus class-action lawsuits and complaints from rival companies. While it was said that Gates would have continued fighting the federal suit, Ballmer sought to settle these, saying: "Being the object of a lawsuit, effectively, or a complaint from your government is a very awkward, uncomfortable position to be in. It just has all downside. People assume if the government brought a complaint that there's really a problem, and your ability to say we're a good, proper, moral place is tough. It's actually tough, even though you feel that way about yourselves."

Ballmer was a director of Accenture and a general partner of Accenture SCA from 2001 to 2006. Details about his remuneration in these positions remain undisclosed.

In 2007, Ballmer said, "iPhone is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't have a keyboard... There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance..."

Speaking at a conference in NYC in 2009, Ballmer criticized Apple's pricing, saying, "Now I think the tide has turned back the other direction (against Apple). The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment—same piece of hardware—paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."

On September 25, 2014, Ballmer said he would bar the team from using Apple products such as iPads, and replace them with Microsoft products. It has been reported that he had previously also barred his family from using iPhones.

In 2015, when Apple had become the world's most valuable company, Ballmer called Microsoft's decision to invest in Apple to save it from bankruptcy in 1997 as the "craziest thing we ever did".

In 2016, Ballmer revisited his iPhone statements, saying, "People like to point to this quote...but the reason I said that was [that] the price of $600–$700 was too high". He said he did not realize that Apple was going to have phone carriers build the cost into the customer's monthly bill.

On March 6, 2008, Seattle mayor Greg Nickels announced that a local ownership group involving Ballmer made a "game-changing" commitment to invest $150 million in cash toward a proposed $300 million renovation of KeyArena and were ready to purchase the Seattle SuperSonics from the Professional Basketball Club LLC in order to keep the team in Seattle. However, this initiative failed, and the SuperSonics relocated to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where they now play as the Oklahoma City Thunder.

In June 2012, Ballmer was an investor in Chris R. Hansen's proposal to build a new arena in the SoDo neighborhood of Seattle and bring the SuperSonics back to Seattle. On January 9, 2013, Ballmer and Hansen led a group of investors in an attempt to purchase the Sacramento Kings from the Maloof family and relocate them to Seattle for an estimated $650 million. However, this attempt also fell through.

Following the Donald Sterling scandal in May 2014, Ballmer was the highest bidder in an attempt to purchase the Los Angeles Clippers for a reported price of $2 billion, which was then the second-highest bid for a sports franchise in North American sports history (after the $2.15 billion sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012). After a California court confirmed the authority of Shelly Sterling to sell the team, it was announced on August 12, 2014, that Ballmer would become the Los Angeles Clippers owner.

In March 2020, Ballmer agreed to buy The Forum in Inglewood, California. The purchase would allow him to build Intuit Dome in the nearby area since plans for a new Clippers' arena were opposed by the former owners of The Forum.

In a survey conducted by The Athletic in December 2020, Ballmer was voted the best owner in basketball.

In 2021, ProPublica documented how Ballmer is using his ownership of various sports teams as a means to lower his federal income tax to as low as 12%, compared to around 35% for the athletes playing on the team. The report exposes how the Clippers were profitable before their acquisition by Ballmer, but then reported $700 million in losses for tax purposes in following years.

In 2023, ProPublica did another report, about Ballmer's usage of wash sales helped by Goldman Sachs, under the label "Tax Advantaged Loss Harvesting", resulting in tax savings of more than half a billion dollars over 5 years.

As of 5 March 2025, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his personal wealth at around $136 billion, making him the tenth-richest person in the world, and the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List ranked him as the twelfth-richest person with a net worth of $117.8 billion.

On November 12, 2014, it was announced that Ballmer and his wife Connie donated $50 million to the University of Oregon. Connie Ballmer is a University of Oregon alumna and previously was on the institution's board of trustees. The funds will go toward the university's $2 billion fundraising effort, and will focus on scholarships, public health research and advocacy, and external branding/communications. On November 13, 2014, it was announced that Ballmer would provide a gift, estimated at $60 million, to Harvard University's computer science department. The gift would allow the department to hire new faculty, and hopefully increase the national stature of the program. Ballmer previously donated $10 million to the same department in 1994, in a joint gift with Bill Gates.

In 2022, Ballmer donated $425 million to the University of Oregon to fund a new institute that addresses children's behavioral and mental health needs. It was named the Ballmer Institute for Children’s Behavioral Health.

Ballmer is on the World Chairman's Council of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), signifying that he has donated at least $1 million to the JNF.

In 2015, he and his wife co-founded Ballmer Group, a philanthropic investment company that aims to help children, particularly those in poor families, achieve economic mobility. The company has a presence in Washington state, Los Angeles County, and the Detroit metro area.

Ballmer launched USAFacts in 2017, a not-for-profit organization whose goal is to enable people to understand US government revenue, spending and societal impact. He is reported to have contributed $10 million to fund teams of researchers who populated the website's database with official data.