24/7 Insights

• Steve Ballmer’s net worth is $143 billion, according to Bloomberg.
• That makes him richer than Warren Buffett.

He is less famous than Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) founder Bill Gates. He is less well-known than current CEO Satya Nadella, who has become a tech and AI rock star. Steve Ballmer met Gates at Harvard and was Microsoft’s CEO from 2000 to 2014. Ballmer has quietly amassed enough wealth to become the ninth richest man in the world.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Ballmer’s net worth is $143 billion. That puts him slightly behind Gates, who is at $152 billion, and slightly ahead of Warren Buffett, who has a net worth of $138 billion.

Ballmer earned most of his money simply. He did not sell his Microsoft shares and is now a 4% holder, about three times Gates’s ownership stake. Since he departed, Ballmer has watched the value of the stock increase by 10 times.

Ballmer is remembered for his failed efforts to enter the cell phone business. He admits his mistake. (He laughed at the first iPhone when it launched.) More recently he told Bloomberg, “I wish I’d thought about the model of subsidizing phones through the operators. And there was business model innovation by Apple to get it essentially built into the monthly cell phone bill.” He missed making the decision that made Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) one of the world’s most outstanding tech companies.

Ballmer owns basketball’s LA Clippers, which he bought in 2014 for $2 billion. The team is worth twice that now. That increase in value hardly matters to a man who makes $1 billion a year in Microsoft dividend payments.

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