Steve Ballmer Makes Over $1 Billion a Year in Microsoft Dividends

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction | MSFT Price Prediction) pays a quarterly dividend of $0.91 per share, a rate the company’s board raised by 10% in September 2025. For most investors, that translates to a modest income stream. For former CEO Steve Ballmer, it means more than $1 billion in passive income every year. Ballmer owns roughly 333 million shares of Microsoft, making him the company’s largest individual shareholder, and at the current annualized rate of $3.64 per share, those shares throw off well over $1.2 billion in dividends annually.

Ballmer’s place on the global wealth rankings has shifted as markets have moved and as Bill Gates has accelerated his charitable giving. As of early 2026, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated Ballmer’s net worth at around $145 billion, placing him among the top 15 wealthiest people on the planet. Gates, who has committed to donating nearly all of his fortune and has transferred tens of billions to his foundation, has seen his Bloomberg-tracked wealth fall significantly from earlier highs.

What makes Ballmer’s story unusual is its origins. Unlike most people at the top of global wealth rankings, he neither founded a company nor inherited a fortune. He grew up in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and attended Harvard, where he lived down the hall from a fellow sophomore named Bill Gates. After graduating magna cum laude in applied mathematics and economics in 1977, he spent two years at Procter and Gamble before Gates recruited him to join the young software startup in 1980. Ballmer dropped out of Stanford’s MBA program to take the job.

He worked his way up through Microsoft’s ranks, becoming president in 1998 and then CEO on January 13, 2000, when Gates stepped back from daily operations. Over the 14 years Ballmer led the company, Microsoft’s revenue tripled. He stepped down in February 2014 and was replaced by Satya Nadella, who subsequently led Microsoft’s transformation into a cloud and artificial intelligence powerhouse. Under Nadella, Microsoft posted fiscal year 2025 revenue of $281.7 billion, a 15% increase from the prior year.

Ballmer kept his shares after leaving, retaining roughly three times as many as Gates held at the time. That decision to hold has compounded enormously, as Microsoft’s market capitalization has grown from roughly $315 billion when Ballmer departed to several trillion dollars today. One contemporary critique at the time of his departure, voiced by hedge fund manager Eric Jackson of Ironfire Capital, was that Ballmer had failed to launch the kind of transformative consumer products that Apple’s Steve Jobs produced. History has judged that criticism in a complicated light: Nadella’s strategic pivot vindicated much of the enterprise infrastructure Ballmer built.

Beyond his Microsoft stake, Ballmer purchased the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion in 2014, the same year he left Microsoft. The franchise, now valued at roughly $6.7 billion according to a 2025 Sportico analysis, has become a significant part of his overall net worth. His ownership tenure has not been without controversy: in September 2025, the NBA launched an investigation into allegations that Ballmer and the Clippers orchestrated a $28 million endorsement deal between star Kawhi Leonard and Aspiration, a now-bankrupt green banking company, as a way to circumvent the league’s salary cap. Ballmer and Leonard have both denied wrongdoing, and the investigation remained ongoing as of mid-2026.

Ballmer has also built a significant philanthropic record. Through Ballmer Group, the organization he co-founded with his wife Connie in 2014, he has focused on improving economic mobility for children and families in the United States. According to Forbes, the Ballmers had given away more than $4 billion as of recent reporting, a figure that does not include a $50 million donation to the University of Oregon that the couple made shortly after leaving Microsoft.

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Editor’s note: This update reflects Microsoft’s September 2025 dividend increase to $0.91 per share per quarter (annualized rate of $3.64), Ballmer’s revised Bloomberg wealth ranking of approximately 13th globally with a net worth around $145 billion, and the ongoing NBA investigation into alleged salary-cap circumvention involving Ballmer, the Los Angeles Clippers, and Kawhi Leonard.