Steven (or Steve as he is known) Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman that is famous for occupying the CEO seat of Microsoft and for his massive wealth that ranks him on the 23rd spot in the Forbes 400 list in the January of 2015.
Born on March 24th 1956 in Detroit, as the son of Beatrice Dworkin and Frederic Henry Ballmer, he started his childhood in the family of a Swiss immigrant and a Jewish mother from Belarus, growing up in the community of Farmington Hills, Michigan. He was very proficient in school from an early age and he went to college prep and engineering classes at the Lawrence Technological University in 1973.
The Detroit Country Day School is a private college prep school in Beverly Hills, Michigan and he graduated it with a perfect SAT score at the math section, being named a National Merit Scholar. The achievements of his future career led to him taking part in the school’s board of directors.
He went to study at Harvard College and received an A.B. in applied mathematics and economics in 1977, graduating magna cum laude. During his college years he was the manager of the Harvard Crimson football team and he also worked at the newspaper The Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Advocate. He and Bill Gates were down the hall from one another, competing in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition which was sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America.
Once he finished college he worked as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, sharing the office with the future CEO of General Electric Jeffrey R. Immelt and at the same time he was studying at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which he gave up (together with the current job as well) to join Microsoft.
Steve became the 30th employee of the company on June 11, 1980 and he started working as the first business manager, beginning with a $50,000 salary and a percentage of the company ownership. He owned 8% of the company in 1981 but in 2003 he only kept 4%, selling the rest and he modified the employee stock options program in the same year.
In 1990 he married Connie Snyder and they have three sons together.
He worked in the company on various divisions until 1992 when he was named Executive Vice President, Sales and Support. After he helped with the development of the .NET Framework he was promoted to President of Microsoft in July 1998 and he held the title until February 2001, thus becoming the second most important person in the company, next to Bill Gates who was Chairman and CEO. He advanced even further when in January 2000 was named Chief Executive Officer, taking care of the finances and operations of the company and leaving Gates as the chairman of the board and chief software architect.
The period when Ballmer became CEO was a difficult one for the company since it was in an antitrust lawsuit with the US government and from rival companies. So Ballmer requested very detailed justifications for all the new products before approving them, figuring out a scorecard system to measure customer satisfaction and several other sales metrics developed with the aid of B. Kevin Turner who joined the company in 2005 as chief operating officer after stepping down as the executive vice president of Wal-Mart Stores.
With Ballmer as CEO the structure of the company went through important changes, replacing the major division heads and orienting the computing strategy toward acquisitions like Skype. The revenue of the company went from $25 billion a year to $70 billion, with a gross profit of 75 cents for every dollar in sales. A data centers division was built and the Xbox entertainment devices kept the other gaming consoles at bay.
The Post-PC era led to some criticism since Microsoft didn’t manage to keep up the pace and thus most tablets, smartphones or music players of today run on other systems. The share price stagnated due to this fact and in May 2012 the hedge fund manager David Einhorn asked Steve Ballmer to step down as CEO of Microsoft and on February 4, 2014 Satya Nadella took his place.
Although he was quite efficient in keeping up pace with the other operating systems and traditional software, he was quite unaware of how much the mobile industry would develop and in 2007 he said “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” At the Web 2.0 Summit in 2011 he also stated that “You don’t need to be a computer scientist to use a Windows Phone and you do to use an Android phone… It is hard for me to be excited about the Android phones.”
His energetic presence and enthusiasm is ideal for sports and there are plenty of events when he went wild with joy during the games (search the Internet for “Steve Ballmer goes crazy” and you will see what we mean). Previously he tried to take control of the Seattle SuperSonics or the Sacramento Kings but those ventures proved unsuccessful, after trying to invest in the renovation of the KeyArena or invested in the new arena that was proposed by Chris Hansen in the SoDo neighborhood.
Once his involvement with Microsoft ended he could focus on one of his other passions which was basketball, since in May, 2014 he was the highest bidder for the Los Angeles Clippers, reportedly paying $2 billion for the team, making it the second largest bid in the North American sports history. The purchase went easier than his previous attempts due to a scandal began by TMZ with a recording in which Donald Sterling, the owner of the team, made several racist remarks.
Another occupation was his philanthropic actions, donating $50 million to the University of Oregon in 2014 and they will focus on scholarships, public health research and external branding. He also mentioned that he will offer a gift to the Harvard University computer science department that would permit the department to hire new faculty and thus improve the prestige of the program. He previously made a donation of $10 million to the same department in 1994 together with Bill Gates.
