Steve Ballmer Makes $1 Billion a Year in Microsoft Dividends

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 11, 9:15AM EDT

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Former Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Steve Balmer makes $1 billion a year from Microsoft dividends.
He is one of the richest people in the world.

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Steve Ballmer Makes $1 Billion a Year in Microsoft Dividends — © Kativ / E+ via Getty Images

Former Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT | MSFT Price Prediction) CEO Steve Ballmer makes $1 billion a year from Microsoft dividends. The huge tech company has a dividend of $3.32 per year. Ballmer is the sixth richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $163 billion. That is just behind his former boss, Bill Gates, who has a net worth of $176 billion.

Unlike most of the world’s richest people, Ballmer did not start a company or inherit money from a rich family. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he met Bill Gates, co-founder and long-time CEO of Microsoft. Gates hired him just after Microsoft was founded, and he worked his way up to the CEO’s job.

Ballmer’s net worth is so high because he held Microsoft stock long after leaving the CEO position in 2014. He joined the tech company in 1980 and became CEO in 2000. During his 14-year tenure as CEO, Microsoft’s revenue tripled. As Ballmer left, Eric Jackson at the hedge fund Ironfire Capital told Reuters, “I don’t see anybody else on the management team at Microsoft that I think would be much better than Ballmer.” However, Ballmer received criticism for not launching popular products like the rival Steve Jobs did at Apple.

Ballmer kept 333 million shares despite leaving, about triple the number Gates has kept. His total makes him the largest private holder of Microsoft stock.

Ballmer has become a major philanthropist. While not as visible as Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to Forbes, “He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014; to date the Ballmers have given away more than $4 billion.”

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.