Steve Ballmer
American businessman, former chief executive officer of Microsoft
Steven Anthony Ballmer ( BAWL-mər; born March 24, 1956) is an American businessman and investor who was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and a co-founder of the Ballmer Group, a philanthropic investment company.
As of February 2026, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his personal wealth at around $145 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest person in the world, and the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List ranked him as the fourteenth-richest person with a net worth of $130 billion.
Ballmer was hired by Bill Gates at Microsoft in 1980, and subsequently left the MBA program at Stanford University. He eventually became president in 1998, and replaced Gates as CEO on January 13, 2000. 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. Under Ballmer's leadership, a 14-year period, 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.
Until a recent scandal, some claimed Ballmer's ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers as an improvement over previous owner Donald Sterling, citing his willingness to acquire superstar players and finance the construction of Intuit Dome.
Early life and education
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.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q181162. VIAF identifies the subject as 23149105996668490141. The Library of Congress control number is n2002021730. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 2000, 2014 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steve Ballmer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.