Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony Ballmer was born in Detroit on March 24, 1956, and grew up in the suburb of Farmington Hills. His father, Frederic Henry Ballmer, was a Swiss immigrant and a manager at the Ford Motor Company, and his mother, Beatrice Dworkin, came from a family that owned a Detroit auto parts business.⁠[1][1]

He attended the private preparatory school Detroit Country Day School, graduating in 1973, and while there also took engineering classes at the Lawrence Institute of Technology (now Lawrence Technological University).⁠[1][1]

He entered Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, double-majoring in mathematics and economics; he wrote for and edited the student daily The Harvard Crimson, worked on the literary journal The Harvard Advocate and served as student manager of the varsity football team. In his sophomore year he lived down the hall from his classmate Bill Gates, and the two became friends. In 1977 he graduated magna cum laude with an AB degree.⁠[1][1][1][1][2]

After graduating he worked at Procter & Gamble as an assistant product manager, sharing an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, who later became chairman and CEO of General Electric.⁠[1][1]

In 1979 he entered the Stanford Graduate School of Business to pursue an MBA, leaving in 1980 without graduating.⁠[1][2]

In 1980, at Gates’s invitation, he joined Microsoft, then a small company, becoming its 30th employee and first business manager at a salary of $50,000 a year plus an ownership stake; when Microsoft formally incorporated in 1981, the stake translated into 8 percent of the company’s stock.⁠[1][2][1][1]

In the early 1980s he headed several divisions, including operating systems development, sales and support, and operations; in 1984 he was promoted to head of the systems software group, and while Microsoft was developing OS/2 with IBM it also developed Windows under his leadership, first released in 1985.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Microsoft held its initial public offering in 1986, and Ballmer’s stake made him a multimillionaire before he turned thirty.⁠[1]

As of 1992 he was Microsoft’s executive vice president of sales and support.⁠[1]

In July 1998 Gates made Ballmer president of the company, a move widely seen as the beginning of Gates’s withdrawal from daily management.⁠[1][3]

On January 13, 2000, at a press conference, Gates handed the leadership of Microsoft to Ballmer: Gates kept his position as chairman and took the title of chief software architect, while Ballmer added the role of CEO to his post as president, which he relinquished only in February 2001. Some speculated at the time that Gates gave up the CEO post to protect the company from the Department of Justice’s antitrust effort to break it up; Gates said the case “had absolutely no bearing” on his decision.⁠[3][3][1][3][3]

Ballmer and Gates jointly funded the Maxwell Dworkin building at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, home to computer science and electrical engineering and named after their mothers. At its dedication in October 2000, Ballmer said he wanted Harvard to have the best computer science and electrical engineering department in the country.⁠[4][4][4][4]

On June 1, 2001, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Ballmer said that Linux is “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches,” arguing that, as the GNU GPL license is written, using any open-source software requires making the rest of one’s software open source. The Register’s Thomas C Greene wrote in criticism that the GPL does not mean that releasing one piece of GPL software forces all of one’s other software on sale to become open source.⁠[5][5][5][5]

In March 2016, after Microsoft announced that SQL Server would run on Linux, Ballmer emailed CEO Satya Nadella that he “loved” the decision, and at a dinner hosted by Fortune said his earlier stance on Linux had been right for its time, that the Linux threat was now “in the rearview mirror,” and that the hard-line stance had earned Microsoft more revenue.⁠[6][6][6]

In April 2007, Ballmer told USA TodayUSA TODAYUSA TODAY is a national general-interest daily newspaper and news brand in the United States. Founded under the leadership of Allen Neuharth and first published on September 15, 1982, it is known for its color pages, short stories, and abundant graphics. It is now published by USA TODAY Co. (formerly Gannett) and is the national flagship brand of the USA TODAY Network, and its brands also include the sports brand USA TODAY Sports.Open the full entry that there was “no chance” the iPhone would get “any significant market share,” saying he would rather have Microsoft’s software on 60 to 80 percent of phones than the 2 or 3 percent Apple might get.⁠[7][7][7]

On September 19, 2013, at his last analyst meeting as CEO, Ballmer said his greatest regret was that in the early 2000s the company had been so focused on Windows (what became Windows Vista) that it could not redeploy talent to “the new device called the phone,” and acknowledged that Microsoft had “almost no share” in mobile devices.⁠[8][8][8]

In May 2012, Forbes contributor Adam Hartung called Ballmer “the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today,” arguing that he had steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest-growing markets, including mobile music, handsets and tablets, and dragged down partners such as Dell, HP and Nokia. On the other hand, according to Microsoft figures, the company tripled revenues and doubled profits after Ballmer took over in 2000.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

On August 21, 2013, Ballmer notified Microsoft’s board that he planned to retire within 12 months and would remain CEO until a successor was appointed; the company announced it on August 23.⁠[9][9]

In September 2013, weeks after Ballmer announced his retirement, Microsoft announced the purchase of Nokia’s phone business and patents; the deal closed in April 2014 at a total price of about $7.9 billion. On July 8, 2015, Microsoft under Nadella announced a restructuring of its phone hardware business, cut up to 7,800 positions and took an impairment charge of about $7.6 billion related to the acquisition. Analyst Jack Gold called the purchase “a mistake to begin with” and “a monumental mistake.” Ballmer had pushed the deal in his final months in office, against the objections of Nadella and others at the time.⁠[10][11][11][10][10]

On February 4, 2014, Microsoft’s board appointed Satya Nadella as CEO. Ballmer said that having worked with Nadella for more than 20 years, he knew Nadella was the right leader at the right time for Microsoft; he remained a board member after stepping down.⁠[12][12][12]

In May 2014 Ballmer agreed to buy the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion; after a California court ruled that Shelly Sterling had the right to sell the team, the NBA confirmed the sale on August 12, 2014, and Shelly Sterling said it was the highest price ever paid for a professional sports franchise in North America. Ballmer then issued a statement promising to be “hardcore” in supporting the team.⁠[13][13][13][13][13]

On August 19, 2014, in an open letter to Nadella, Ballmer announced that he was leaving Microsoft’s board, saying the Clippers, civic contribution, teaching and study would take a lot of his time and that continuing on the board would be impractical. His involvement with Microsoft had lasted 34 years.⁠[14][14][14]

In November 2014 Harvard announced that Ballmer would fund a 50 percent increase in its ladder-track computer science faculty, from 24 to 36 positions, with recruiting focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science. Ballmer called computer science “the operating system for innovation.”⁠[4][4][4][4]

In 2015 Ballmer and his wife Connie Ballmer co-founded the philanthropy Ballmer Group, which works to improve economic mobility for children and families in the United States and has regional teams in Southeast Michigan, Los Angeles County and Washington State.⁠[15][15][15]

After retiring, Ballmer wanted to understand how the government spends tax dollars, and in 2017 he founded the not-for-profit website USAFacts, which gathers and explains public data from federal, state and local governments. It is privately funded entirely by Ballmer, accepts no outside donations or advertising, and is not a 501(c)(3) organization.⁠[16][16][16][16]

In 2024 the Clippers moved into their new home, Intuit Dome in Inglewood, built at a cost of about $2 billion financed by Ballmer.⁠[1][17]

In September 2025, following a report by podcast journalist Pablo Torre, the NBA began investigating whether a $28 million endorsement contract between Clippers star Kawhi Leonard and Aspiration Fund Adviser LLC broke league rules; Ballmer had invested in Aspiration, which had filed for bankruptcy, and its co-founder Joseph Sanberg pleaded guilty to defrauding investors and lenders of at least $248 million and was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison. Ballmer and the Clippers denied wrongdoing.⁠[18][1][18]

On September 2, 2026, the NBA announced the findings of a nearly year-long investigation led by the New York law firm Wachtell Lipton, which found “a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations” by the Clippers, a prior offender: the team forfeited five first-round draft picks from 2029 to 2033 and was fined $30 million; Ballmer was suspended from all league and team activities for one year for “knowingly seeking to help Mr. Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities,” approving a business deal he knew was a precondition for Aspiration’s contract with Leonard, and failing to ensure the team followed league rules; two team executives were suspended and Leonard was fined $700,000. NBA Commissioner Adam SilverAdam SilverAdam Silver is an American sports executive and lawyer who has been commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) since February 1, 2014, overseeing a sports and media organization made up of the NBA, the WNBA, the NBA G League, the NBA 2K League and the Basketball Africa League. He joined the NBA in 1992 and was deputy commissioner and chief operating officer before succeeding David Stern as commissioner; as of October 2026, he is also chair of the Duke University Board of Trustees and a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation.Open the full entry said he was “deeply disappointed” by the flagrant violations and the Clippers’ institutional and leadership failures.⁠[19][19][19][19][19][18][19]

The Clippers issued a statement the same day saying they “vehemently reject” the NBA’s findings, calling the investigation heavily biased and aimed at justifying a predetermined narrative, and vowed to challenge them through every available avenue; Ballmer’s attorney David Kelley, in a letter to Silver, called the investigation “a witch hunt” and the penalties a “gross injustice,” and said no league rule prohibits team personnel from introducing players to sponsors at their request. On the night of September 13, Ballmer changed course in a statement apologizing to fans, employees and fellow team owners, accepting responsibility as principal owner, confirming that the fine had been paid and the penalties would be complied with and that he would not pursue legal action, while saying there were “still disagreements” about the report’s findings.⁠[18][18][19][19][20][21][21][21][21]

On July 1, 2026, the Ballmers announced three independently operated philanthropies funded by them in Southeast Michigan, Los Angeles County and Washington State, MoveUp Southeast Michigan, MoveUp LA and MoveUp Washington, to take over Ballmer Group’s regional work over a one-year transition; Ballmer Group would then focus increasingly on a smaller set of large, scalable initiatives.⁠[22][22][22][22]

In Forbes’s ranking of the world’s richest people as of 12 a.m. Eastern time on October 1, 2026, Ballmer ranked ninth with a net worth of $161 billion, up about $5 billion from the previous month, with his rank unchanged; his fortune comes mainly from Microsoft, of which he owned 4 percent when he retired and has held onto much of since.⁠[17][17][17][17]

On October 5, 2026, the Ballmers wrote as co-founders that they wanted to deploy more of their resources during their lifetimes to help more children and families, and that Ballmer Group would remain relatively small and concentrate its resources on fewer, larger initiatives, organizations and networks able to reach people at scale, which meant stepping back from annual grants to some organizations; as an example, they noted they had committed up to $1.7 billion over ten years to fund up to 10,000 preschool slots a year through Washington State’s existing early learning program ECEAP.⁠[23][23][23][23][23][23]

Ballmer Group: Official website: https://ballmergroup.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

USAFacts: Official website: https://usafacts.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]