Steven Anthony “Steve” Ballmer (born March 24, 1956) is the former chief executive officer of Microsoft from January 2000 to February 2014, and is the current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. As of August 10, 2016, his personal wealth is estimated at US$28.1 billion, ranking him the 22nd richest person in the world. It was announced on August 23, 2013, that he would step down as Microsoft’s CEO within 12 months. On February 4, 2014, Ballmer retired as CEO and was succeeded by Satya Nadella; Ballmer resigned from the Board of Directors on August 19, 2014 to prepare for teaching a new class and for the start of the NBA season.
On May 29, 2014, Ballmer placed a bid of $2 billion to purchase the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) after NBA commissioner Adam Silver forced Donald Sterling to sell the team. He officially became the Clippers owner on August 12, 2014.
Early life
Ballmer was born in Detroit, the son of Beatrice Dworkin and Frederic Henry Ballmer (Fritz Hans Ballmer), a manager at the Ford Motor Company. His father was a Swiss immigrant, and his mother was Jewish (her family was from Belarus). Through his mother, Ballmer is a second cousin of actress and comedian Gilda Radner. Ballmer grew up in the affluent community of Farmington Hills, Michigan. In 1973, he attended college prep and engineering classes at Lawrence Technological University. He graduated valedictorian from Detroit Country Day School, a private college preparatory school in Beverly Hills, Michigan, with a score of 800 on the mathematical section of the SAT and was a National Merit Scholar. He now sits on the school’s board of directors. In 1977, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a B.A. in applied mathematics and economics.
At college, Ballmer was a manager for the Harvard Crimson football team, worked on The Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates. He scored highly in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, an exam sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, scoring higher than Bill Gates. He then worked as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble for two years, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, who later became CEO of General Electric. In 1980, he dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business to join Microsoft.
Ballmer is the former CEO of Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker. He stepped down in 2014 and remains the largest individual shareholder of the company, which makes the Windows operating system, the Xbox game console and Surface tablet computers. Ballmer also owns the L.A. Clippers basketball team.
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