49 Facts About Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman and investor who served as chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014.

Steve Ballmer is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association.

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

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

On February 4,2014, Steve Ballmer retired as CEO and was replaced by Satya Nadella; Steve Ballmer remained on Microsoft's board of directors until August 19,2014.

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

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

Steve Ballmer lived in Brussels from 1964 to 1967, where he attended the International School of Brussels.

Steve Ballmer 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.

Steve Ballmer, the first in his family to graduate from college, attended Harvard College, 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.

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

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

However, Steve Ballmer's profit-share started to balloon out of control as Microsoft grew.

Steve Ballmer was promoted to President of Microsoft in July 1998, making him the de facto number two after the chairman and CEO, Bill Gates.

On January 13,2000, Steve Ballmer was officially named the chief executive officer; he would shed the title of president in February 2001.

When Steve 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.

Steve Ballmer drove Microsoft's "connected computing" strategy with acquisitions such as Skype.

Steve Ballmer built half a dozen new businesses, such as the data centers division and the Xbox entertainment and devices division, and oversaw the acquisition of Skype.

Steve 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.

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

Steve Ballmer 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.

Steve Ballmer was Gates' best man at his wedding to Melinda French, and the two men described their relationship as a marriage.

Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Gates stormed out of a meeting after a shouting match in which Steve Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time.

Steve Ballmer said that his push into the hardware business, specifically smartphones, which Gates did not support, contributed to their relationship breakdown.

Steve Ballmer says that he regretted the lack of focus on Windows Mobile in the early 2000s, leaving Microsoft a distant third in the smartphone market [in 2013].

Steve Ballmer called the acquisition of the mobile phone division of Nokia his "toughest decision" during his tenure.

Steve Ballmer hosted his last company meeting in September 2013, and stepped down from the company's board of directors in August 2014.

In December 2023, CNN estimated that Steve Ballmer was set to collect $1 billion in dividends from his ongoing ownership of Microsoft stock, after the company announced an increase in its dividend to $3 per share.

Steve Ballmer was a director of Accenture and a general partner of Accenture SCA from 2001 to 2006.

In 2015, when Apple had become the world's most valuable company, Steve Ballmer called Microsoft's decision to invest in Apple to save it from bankruptcy in 1997 as the "craziest thing we ever did".

Steve Ballmer said he did not realize that Apple was going to have phone carriers build the cost into the customer's monthly bill.

In July 2000, Steve Ballmer called the free software Linux kernel "communism" and further claimed that it infringed with Microsoft's intellectual property.

Steve Ballmer used the notion of "viral" licensing terms to express his concern over the fact that the GNU General Public License employed by such software requires that all derivative software be under the GPL or a compatible license.

In March 2016, Steve Ballmer changed his stance on Linux, saying that he supports his successor Satya Nadella's open source commitments.

Steve Ballmer maintained that his comments in 2001 were right at the time but that times have changed.

At that point, Mr Steve Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office.

Steve Ballmer then resumed attempting to persuade Lucovsky to stay at Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer has described Lucovsky's account of the incident as a "gross exaggeration of what actually took place".

In 2013, Steve Ballmer said that Google was a "monopoly" that should be pressured from market competition authorities.

In June 2012, Ballmer was an investor in Chris R Hansen's proposal to build a new arena in the SoDo neighborhood of Seattle and bring the SuperSonics back to Seattle.

On September 25,2014, Steve Ballmer said he would bar the team from using Apple products such as iPads, and replace them with Microsoft products.

In March 2020, Steve Ballmer agreed to buy The Forum in Inglewood, California.

Connie Steve Ballmer is a University of Oregon alumna and previously was on the institution's board of trustees.

On November 13,2014, it was announced that Steve Ballmer would provide a gift, estimated at $60 million, to Harvard University's computer science department.

Steve Ballmer previously donated $10 million to the same department in 1994, in a joint gift with Bill Gates.

In 2022, Steve Ballmer donated $425 million to the University of Oregon to fund a new institute for children's behavioral health.

Steve Ballmer is on the World Chairman's Council of the Jewish National Fund, which means he has donated US$1 million or more to the JNF.

Steve Ballmer is reported to have contributed $10 million to fund teams of researchers who populated the website's database with official data.

Steve Ballmer married philanthropist Connie Snyder in 1990, and the couple have three sons.