Steve Ballmer Is Worth $164 Billion, After Being Kicked Out Of Microsoft
Steve Ballmer got pushed out of Microsoft as a failure, ridiculed for missing smartphones and the cloud. What happened next defies every assumption about who actually won.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Steve Ballmer, banished from the NBA for bad behavior, was pushed out as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction) CEO in 2014 and is the world’s 7th-richest person, with a net worth of $186 billion. His former boss, Bill Gates, ranks 17th at $119 billion (maybe because of his 2021 divorce).
Satya Nadella replaced Ballmer as CEO. Nadella had held the CEO job for a decade. The stock had performed poorly under Ballmer. He missed the smartphone revolution. He missed the early stages of cloud computing.
Some people thought Ballmer was made CEO because of a friendship he had with Gates at Harvard that stretched back to 1976. In 1980, Ballmer became Microsoft’s 30th employee and served as Bill Gates’s primary lieutenant until he moved upstairs as Gates stepped down as CEO.
Ballmer did not get mad. He got even. Since 1986, Microsoft shares are up 520,000%. Ballmer owns 4.2% of the company.
Ballmer must have seen that Nadella was a better pick to run the company. The new CEO never pushed into smartphones, as Apple had too large a lead. He did move into cloud computing, where Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) was not present at all. That left him in competition with Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) AWS. By most measures, Microsoft is second in that business. And Nadella continued to expand its core Windows business. Microsoft’s revenue in 2016 was $97 billion; in the most recent fiscal year, it was $332 billion. AI may make the figure explode upward again, although Microsoft may have been left behind by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Ballmer doesn’t have to worry.
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