Steve Ballmer Net Worth 2025

Steve Ballmer net worth 2025: Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman 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. He is a co-founder of Ballmer Group, a philanthropic investment company.

Steve Ballmer net worth

Steve Ballmer net worth: Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman and investor. He previously served as the chief executive officer of Microsoft. He is the current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Steve Ballmer net worth is $78.2 billion making him one of the richest people in the world.

Early life and education

Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan; he is the son of Beatrice Dworkin and Frederic Henry Ballmer a manager at the Ford Motor Company. His father was a Swiss immigrant.

 Ballmer grew up in the affluent community of Farmington Hills, Michigan. Ballmer also lived in Brussels from 1964 to 1967, where he attended the International School of Brussels.

In 1973, Steve 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

In 1977, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in applied mathematics and economics.

School Life

Ballmer was exceptionally a brilliant student. He  was a manager for the Harvard Crimson football team and a member of the Fox Club.

He also worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates.

Steve scored highly in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, an exam sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, scoring higher than Bill Gates.

 He then 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, in 1980 Ballmer dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business to join Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer Career at Microsoft

Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980, and became Microsoft’s 30th employee, the first business manager hired by Gates.

He 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 2003, Ballmer sold 39.3 million Microsoft shares equating to approximately $955 million, thereby reducing his ownership to 4%. The same year, he replaced Microsoft’s employee stock options program.

Microsoft Positions

In the 20 years following his hire, Ballmer headed several Microsoft divisions, including operations, operating systems development, and sales and support. From February 1992 onwards, he was Executive Vice President, Sales, and Support. Ballmer led Microsoft’s development of the .NET Framework.

Ballmer was then promoted to President of Microsoft, a title that he held from July 1998 to February 2001, making him the de facto number two in the company to the chairman and CEO, Bill Gates.

Chief Executive Officer

On January 13, 2000, Ballmer was officially named the chief executive officer.  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.

Read Bill Gates net worth

Under Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, Microsoft’s share price stagnated. The lackluster stock performance occurred despite Microsoft’s financial success at that time. 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 is double that of Google or IBM.

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In terms of leading the company’s total annual profit growth, Ballmer’s tenure at Microsoft (16.4%) 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%).

Steve Ballmer Net Worth

Steve Ballmer net worth is $78.2 billion according to Forbes. 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.

The same year he retired from Microsoft he bought the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion.

He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014, putting over $2 billion into a donor-advised fund, with a focus on lifting Americans out of poverty.

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