Steve Ballmer on going from $40,000 a year to becoming one of the world’s richest billionaires

Former Microsoft CEO and LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer has consistently ranked among the world’s wealthiest billionaires. 

Despite his vast fortune, friends say Ballmer is still the kind of guy who complains about the cost of a hotel minibar. The billionaire has no superyacht, no fancy wardrobe and still lives in the four-bedroom house where he and his wife raised their three sons. Still, there’s no doubt that having a net worth north of $120 billion-plus has impacted Ballmer. 

“I am fundamentally changed. I know I am,” Ballmer said. 

Ballmer’s beginnings 

Growing up in suburban Detroit, Ballmer was a shy, anxious kid. His father, a Swiss immigrant, worked a mid-level job at Ford. Ballmer went to Harvard, where he managed the football team and struck up a close friendship with another Harvard student: Bill Gates. 

Gates dropped out to start a software company, while Ballmer went in a different direction: sales and marketing at Procter & Gamble, selling Duncan Hines brownie mix, blueberry muffin mix and Moist ‘n’ Easy snack cake mix. But baked goods, he found, were not his calling, so Ballmer went to Stanford Business School. He was midway through his first year when he got a call from Gates, who wanted to recruit Ballmer for his chaotic software startup. 

“But software for microcomputers, it was not a thing at the time in any way, shape or form,” Ballmer said. 

Nevertheless, Gates was convincing, and Ballmer left school to join his friend.

Ballmer’s salary? $40,000 plus a 9% stake in Gate’s company. 

Ballmer’s legacy at Microsoft 

Together, Gates and Ballmer came to personify Microsoft. Enthusiasm became Ballmer’s trademark, and a meme after a video of a sweat-soaked Ballmer chanting “developers, developers, developers” went viral. 

“That’s a guy who really wanted to fire people up. To say, ‘Hey, we love you. We want you to write software for Windows,'” Ballmer said.

Looking back on it now, Ballmer admits he feels a little embarrassed about it.

But “I personally feed off energy,” he said. “And it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, by the way. I mean, you know, some people are quieter. But it’s me.” 

Ballmer took over as Microsoft CEO in 2000 and his tenure was marked by wins and losses. He famously failed to take the challenge of Apple’s iPhone seriously when it launched, laughing at the idea in 2007. 

“Gosh darn it. You know, the phone. Man, the phone. We should’ve been in the phone. We should’ve been the leader,” he said. 

And yet during Ballmer’s tenure as CEO, Microsoft’s revenue more than tripled. He hung on to most of his stock and has seen his personal fortune soar. 

From computers to basketball

Ballmer left Microsoft in 2014, the same year he bought the LA Clippers. People have asked if he always wanted to own a basketball team.

“Of course not,” Ballmer said. “Who the heck ever thinks you’re going to get enough money to own a basketball team?”

It’s different from running Microsoft, a company with revenues that are 20 times higher than those of the NBA. But Ballmer says he’s having more fun in this job, in part because it’s much easier to measure performance.

“People ask me ‘What’s the difference between business and basketball?’-  Well, if you have a bad quarter you can say, ‘I’ll get him next time’ or ‘You don’t know what we got going on in the labs but it’s going to be great,'” Ballmer said. “Here, every 24 seconds you get a scorecard. ‘Did we score? Did we stop them from scoring?’ Every 24 seconds. At the end of the game if you lose it, you can never change it.”

Jon Wertheim

L. Jon Wertheim is an accomplished journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent.