There are only ten people in the world whose fortunes exceed $100 billion. All of them are founding owners of their companies—except one: former Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer, 67, is worth a whopping $120 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index. He is now the world’s sixth richest person and is wealthier than Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Ballmer is only $17 billion poorer than his former boss and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The vast majority of Ballmer’s fortune is tied to his equity ownership in Microsoft, where he was CEO for 14 years until his retirement in 2014.
Startup founders usually own a large stake in their companies. And, if their business takes off, the value of their founding stakes soars. That’s how most tech entrepreneurs become overnight multimillionaires or even billionaires. Ballmer, despite having never started a company of his own, walked a similar path as one of Microsoft’s earliest employees.
Steve Ballmer’s long history with Bill Gates and Microsoft
Ballmer and Gates were college classmates at Harvard. While Gates dropped out to start his own business, Ballmer finished school, took an office job at Procter & Gamble for two years and went on to pursue an MBA at Stanford University. He eventually became a dropout, too, when Gates asked him to work for Microsoft in 1980 as its 30th employee.
When he joined, Ballmer negotiated a $50,000 base salary plus 10 percent of all the profit growth he could generate. Ballmer led Microsoft’s sales and operations teams in its early years and his profit-sharing agreement quickly became excessive as the company’s business boomed. He later exchanged his cut of the profits for an equity stake. By 2003 when he was CEO, Ballmer’s stake in Microsoft was worth close to $2 billion.
Ballmer became Microsoft’s president in 1998 and replaced Gates as CEO in 2000. He retired in 2014 at age 58 with 333 million Microsoft shares, or 4 percent of the company. After retirement, Ballmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team for $2 billion. Today, Ballmer’s Microsoft ownership is worth over $100 billion, according to Bloomberg’s calculation. The software giant’s stock has soared 44 percent this year, adding $34 billion to Ballmer’s net worth.
Microsoft reported quarterly earnings today (July 25).