Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony Ballmer (/ˈbɔːlmər/; March 24, 1956) is an American business magnate and investor who served as the chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). As of April 2022, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his personal wealth at around $105 billion, making him the ninth-richest person on Earth.

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, when he left to prepare for teaching a new class.

His tenure and legacy as Microsoft CEO has received mixed reception, with the company tripling sales and doubling profits, but losing its market dominance and missing out on 21st-century technology trends such as the ascendance of smartphones in the form of iPhone and Android.

Childhood & Early Life

Steve Ballmer was born on March 24, 1956, in Detroit, to Beatrice Dworkin and Frederic Henry Ballmer. He has a sister, Shelly. His father was a manager at the Ford Motor Company and his family was an affluent one. Ballmer is of Swiss and Jewish ethnicity.

He attended the Detroit Country Day School on a scholarship and graduated with a perfect score of 800 on the mathematical section of the SAT. Then he enrolled at Harvard College from where he graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in applied mathematics and economics, in 1977. While studying there he became friends with Bill Gates, a fellow student.

Ballmer loved sports and was a manager for the Harvard Crimson football team. He also worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate.

Microsoft

Ballmer graduated from Harvard University in 1977 with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and economics. After working for two years at consumer products company Procter & Gamble as a product manager, he attended the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. In 1980 he left school to become a business manager for Bill Gates, a friend from Harvard who had dropped out of school and cofounded Microsoft. Over the next two decades, Ballmer held various posts as Microsoft grew into one of the most powerful and profitable companies in American history. Much of its initial success was due to the dominance of its operating systems MS/DOS and Windows.

In 1998 Ballmer became president of Microsoft, and two years later he became the company’s CEO, after Gates stepped down from that position to become chairman. Under Ballmer’s leadership, Microsoft diversified its focus through new products such as the electronic game console system Xbox, first released in 2001, and the Zune family of portable media players introduced in 2006.

The Xbox struggled to make consistent profits, however, and the Zune players failed to challenge the market dominance of Apple’s iPod. Ballmer faced another challenge in 2007, when Microsoft’s operating system Vista was greeted with mixed reviews.

Gates, in order to concentrate on his philanthropic interests, withdrew from daily obligations at Microsoft in 2008, making Ballmer even more prominent as the public face of Microsoft. In 2009 the company expanded into the search engine market, releasing Bing. Later that year Microsoft brokered a deal with Internet portal site Yahoo! in which Yahoo! would use Bing for its Web site and handle premium advertisements for Microsoft’s Web site.

In 2011 Ballmer helped arrange the $8.5 billion acquisition of the Internet communication company Skype. It was the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history and placed the company in competition with Apple’s video chat service FaceTime and Google’s Internet communication service Voice.

In August 2013 Ballmer announced that he would be stepping down as CEO within a year, and he was succeeded by Satya Nadella in February 2014. Later that year Ballmer purchased the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA.

Awards & Achievements

Steve Ballmer was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in Paris by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Personal Life & Legacy

He married Connie Snyder in 1990. They have three sons.

Both Ballmer and his wife are active on the philanthropic front and were reported to have donated $50 million to the University of Oregon in 2014.

Net Worth

Steve Ballmer has a net worth of $22.2 billion.

Philanthropic Works

In 1994, Ballmer and Bill Gates jointly donated $10 million to Harvard University's computer science department.

In 2014, Ballmer again donated money to Harvard University's computer science department to enable it to hire new faculty.

In 2014, Ballmer donated $50 million to the University of Oregon for the purpose of scholarships, public health research and advocacy, and external branding/communications.