Steve Ballmer

Net worth over time

Biography

• Steve Ballmer is the high-energy former CEO of Microsoft, who led the company from 2000 to 2014.
• He joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford's MBA program. He first met Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates when the two were undergrads at Harvard.
• Ballmer oversaw Microsoft after the first dot-com crash and through efforts to catch up to Google in search capabilities and Apple in mobile phones.
• In 2014, the year he retired from Microsoft, he bought the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion; Forbes now values the team at $7.5 billion. He spent another $2 billion building a stadium.
• Ballmer, who owned 4% of Microsoft stock when he retired, has held onto most of his stock and has said he's the company's largest individual shareholder.
• He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014; to date the Ballmers have given away more than $6.5 billion.
• Ballmer created a website called USAFacts.org for people to look up and understand where the government is spending money.

Financial assets