Steve Ballmer

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.

Chief executive officer (2000–2014)

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."

Upon becoming CEO, Ballmer required detailed business justification to approve new products, rather than allowing hundreds of products that sounded potentially interesting or trendy. In 2005, he recruited B. Kevin Turner from Walmart, who was the president and CEO of Sam's Club, to become Microsoft's chief operating officer. Turner was hired at Microsoft to lead the company's sales, marketing, and services group and to instill more process and discipline in the company's operations and salesforce.

Since Bill Gates' retirement, Ballmer oversaw a "dramatic shift away from the company's PC-first heritage", replacing most major division heads in order to break down the "talent-hoarding fiefdoms"; in 2012, this led Businessweek to say that the company "arguably [had] the best product lineup in its history". Ballmer drove Microsoft's "connected computing" strategy with acquisitions such as Skype.

Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's share price stagnated even as the company's annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215% to $23 billion, and its gross profit of 75 cents on every dollar in sales was double that of Google or IBM. With the company's total annual profit growth of 16.4%, Ballmer's tenure at Microsoft surpassed the performances of other well-known CEOs such as General Electric's Jack Welch (11.2%) and IBM's Louis V. Gerstner Jr. (2%). These gains came from the existing Windows and Office franchises, with Ballmer maintaining their profitability, fending off threats from competitors such as Linux and other open-source operating systems and Google Docs. Ballmer also built half a dozen new businesses, such as the data centers division and the Xbox entertainment and devices division ($8.9 billion), and oversaw the acquisition of Skype. Ballmer also constructed the company's $20 billion Enterprise Business, consisting of new products and services such as Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, System Center, and Dynamics CRM, each of which initially faced an uphill battle for acceptance but have emerged as leading or dominant in each category. This diversified product mix helped to offset the company's reliance on PCs and mobile computing devices as the company entered the post-PC era; in reporting quarterly results during April 2013, while Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 had not managed to increase their market share above single digits, the company increased its profit 19% over the previous quarter in 2012, as the Microsoft Business Division (including Office 365) and Server and Tools division (cloud services) are each larger than the Windows division.

Ballmer attracted criticism for failing to capitalize on several new consumer technologies, forcing Microsoft to play catch-up in the areas of tablet computing, smartphones and music players with mixed results. According to The Wall Street Journal, under Ballmer's watch, "In many cases, Microsoft latched onto technologies like smartphones, touchscreens, 'smart' cars and wristwatches that read sports scores aloud long before Apple or Google did. But it repeatedly killed promising projects if they threatened its cash cows [Windows and Office]." Ballmer was even named one of the worst CEOs of 2013 by the BBC. As a result of these many criticisms, in May 2012, hedge fund manager David Einhorn called on Ballmer to step down as CEO of Microsoft. "His continued presence is the biggest overhang on Microsoft's stock," Einhorn said in reference to Ballmer. In a May 2012 column in Forbes magazine, Adam Hartung described Ballmer as "the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company", saying he had "steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, headsets and tablets)".

In 2009, and for the first time since Bill Gates resigned from day-to-day management at Microsoft, Ballmer delivered the opening keynote at CES.

As part of his plans to expand on hardware, on June 19, 2012, Ballmer revealed Microsoft's first ever computer device, a tablet called Microsoft Surface at an event held in Hollywood, Los Angeles. He followed this by announcing the company's purchase of Nokia's mobile phone division in September 2013, his last major acquisition for Microsoft as CEO.

On August 23, 2013, Microsoft announced that Ballmer would retire within the next 12 months. A special committee that included Bill Gates would decide on the next CEO.

There was a list of potential successors to Ballmer as Microsoft CEO, but all had departed the company: Jim Allchin, Brad Silverberg, Paul Maritz, Nathan Myhrvold, Greg Maffei, Pete Higgins, Jeff Raikes, J. Allard, Robbie Bach, Bill Veghte, Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Steven Sinofsky. B. Kevin Turner, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer (COO), was considered by some to be a de facto number two to Ballmer, with Turner described as having a strong grasp of business and operations but lacking technological vision. On February 4, 2014, Satya Nadella succeeded Ballmer as CEO.

Relationship with Bill Gates

Ballmer was Gates' best man at his wedding to Melinda French, and the two men described their relationship as a marriage. They were so close for years that another Microsoft executive described it as a mind meld. Combative debates—a part of Microsoft's corporate culture—that many observers believed were personal arguments occurred within the relationship; while Gates was glad in 2000 that Ballmer was willing to become CEO so he could focus on technology, The Wall Street Journal reported that there was tension surrounding the transition of authority. Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Gates stormed out of a meeting after a shouting match in which Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Ballmer seemed "remorseful", the person said. Once Gates leaves, "I'm not going to need him for anything. That's the principle", Ballmer said. "Use him, yes, need him, no".

In October 2014, a few months after Ballmer left his post at Microsoft, a Vanity Fair profile stated that Ballmer and Gates no longer talk to each other due to animosity over Ballmer's resignation. In a November 2016 interview, Ballmer said he and Gates have "drifted apart" ever since, saying that they always had a "brotherly relationship" beforehand. He said that his push into the hardware business, specifically smartphones, which Gates did not support, contributed to their relationship breakdown.

Wealth and taxes

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.