Steve Ballmer

Steve's mother was the daughter of Samuel Dworkin, a Russian Jew who fled to the United States in 1914 and became a merchant for a glass store.

Through his mother, Ballmer is a second cousin of actress and comedian Gilda Radner.

Ballmer grew up in the affluent community of Farmington Hills, Michigan.

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.

His ownership of the Clippers has generally been well-received.

Players and sportswriters consider him a marked improvement over previous owner Donald Sterling, citing his enthusiasm for the team as well as his willingness to spend large amounts of money to acquire superstar players and finance the construction of Intuit Dome.

Frederic (1923–2000) was from Zuchwil, Switzerland and arrived in the United States in 1948.

Steven Anthony Ballmer (March 24, 1956) is an American business executive and investor who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014.

He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA).

He is a co-founder of Ballmer Group, a philanthropic investment company.

As of March 2024, Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his personal wealth at around $143 billion, making him the sixth-richest person in the world.

Steven Anthony Ballmer was born on March 24, 1956, in Detroit, Michigan as the son of Beatrice Dworkin and Frederic Henry (Fritz Hans) Ballmer, a manager at the Ford Motor Company.

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 790 on the mathematical section of the SAT and was a National Merit Scholar.

(He eventually became a member of the school's board of directors.)

Ballmer, the first in his family to graduate from college, 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.

Ballmer was hired by Bill Gates at Microsoft in 1980, and subsequently left the MBA program at Stanford University.

After briefly trying to write screenplays in Hollywood, he started attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business for his MBA, 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 was offered a salary of $50,000 as well as 5– 10% of the company.

When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8% of the company.

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 the chairman and CEO, Bill Gates.

He eventually became president in 1998, and replaced Gates as CEO on January 13, 2000.

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.

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.

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 U.S. 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.

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.

His tenure as Microsoft CEO is widely viewed as mixed.