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Steve Ballmer
Born	March 24, 1956 (1956-03-24) (age 53) Detroit, Michigan
Residence	United States
Occupation	CEO, Microsoft
Salary	$1,350,8341
Net worth	▼ $11 billion USD (2009)
Spouse(s)	Connie Snyder
Children	3
Website Staff Bio at microsoft.com

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Steven Anthony Ballmer (born Detroit, Michigan March 24, 1956) is an American businessman who has been the chief executive officer of Microsoft Corporation since January 2000.² Ballmer is the second person after Roberto Goizueta to become a billionaire in U.S. dollars based on stock options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was neither a founder nor a relative of a founder. In Forbes 2008 World's Richest People ranking, Ballmer was ranked the 43rd richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $11 billion.^{citation needed}

Contents 1 Family 2 Career 2.1 Pre-Microsoft & Life History 2.2 Microsoft career 3 Public persona 3.1 Viral videos 3.2 On competition 3.2.1 Bill Gates 3.2.2 Free and open source software 3.2.3 Lucovsky/Google 3.3 Sports 4 Media portrayals 5 Notes 6 External links

Family

Ballmer was born into an Ultra Orthodox Jewish family living in Detroit. ³ On October 4, 2007, Ballmer was awarded honorary citizenship of Lausen, Switzerland. His father had worked in Belgium as a manager at Ford Motor Co in the 1960s. In 1990 Ballmer married Connie Snyder, who was on Microsoft's PR team at the Waggener Group in the '80s. They have three children. Ballmer's maternal grandparents lived in Pinsk, Belarus.⁴

Career

This section requires expansion.

Pre-Microsoft & Life History

Steve Ballmer was born March 24, 1956, to a Swiss father and a Jewish-American mother whose family came from the Eastern European city of Pinsk (today in Belarus). It has been reported that Ballmer belongs to Mensa and has an IQ of over 135. He grew up in Farmington Hills, Michigan. In 1973, he graduated from Detroit Country Day School, a high school, and now sits on its board of directors. In 1977, he graduated from Harvard University ⁵ with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics. While in college, Ballmer managed the 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 then worked for two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, who would later become CEO of General Electric.⁶ In 1980, he dropped out from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.⁷

Microsoft career

Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980.⁸, and became Microsoft's 24th employee, the first business manager hired by Gates.^{citation needed} He was initially offered a salary of $50,000 as well as a percentage of ownership of the company. When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8 percent of the company. He has headed several divisions within Microsoft including "Operating Systems Development", "Operations", and "Sales and Support." In January 2000, he was officially named chief executive officer.² As CEO Ballmer handled company finances, however Gates still retained control of the "technological vision." In 2003, Ballmer sold 8.3% of his shareholdings, leaving him with a 4% stake in the company.⁹ The same year, Ballmer replaced Microsoft's employee stock options program. While CEO of Microsoft in 2007, Steven A. Ballmer earned a total compensation of $1,279,821, which included a base salary of $620,000, and a cash bonus of $650,000.¹⁰ In 2008, he earned a total compensation of $1,350,834, which included a base salary of $640,833, and a cash bonus of $700,000.¹¹

In 2009, and for the first time ever, he made the opening keynote at CES, since Bill Gates left Microsoft.

Public persona

Steve Ballmer has been known for his eccentric expressions of enthusiasm. At Microsoft's 25th anniversary celebration in 2000, Ballmer surprised the audience by popping out of the anniversary cake. His performance on stage at an employees' convention was caught on a widely-circulated video known as "Monkey Boy Ballmer." A few days later at a developers' conference, Ballmer repeatedly chanted with sweat drenched underarms "developers, developers, developers, developers" in front of the gathering.

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Viral videos

Footage featuring Ballmer's flamboyant stage appearances at Microsoft events have been widely circulated on the Internet, becoming viral videos. The most famous of these is commonly titled "Steve Ballmer going crazy."¹². This video features Ballmer sprinting and hopping around while verbally screeching, screaming and making other various high pitched noises as well as dramatic hand gestures on a stage for about 45 seconds to the song "Get on Your Feet" after being introduced at a Microsoft employee convention. This video is also known in other names, such as Steve Ballmer Going Nuts, Dance Monkey Boy Dance and Ballsy (aka Steve Ballmer) on Crack. Another video, captured at a developers' conference, featuring Ballmer chanting the word "developers" was viewed by a million viewers on YouTube. ¹³ Another video, which became a "big hit on the web" and was featured on CNN¹⁴ shows Ballmer ducking behind a desk to evade eggs during a speech in Budapest, Hungary¹⁵¹⁶

On competition

Bill Gates

The Wall Street Journal has reported that there was tension surrounding the 2000 transition of authority from Bill Gates and Ballmer. Things became so bitter that, on one occasion, Gates stormed out of a meeting in a huff after a shouting match in which Ballmer jumped to the defense of several colleagues, according to an individual present at the time. After the exchange, Ballmer seemed "remorseful," the person said.

Once Gates leaves, "I'm not going to need him for anything. That's the principle," Ballmer said. "Use him, yes, need him, no."¹⁷

Free and open source software

He has referred to the free Linux operating system as a "[…] cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."¹⁸ Ballmer used the notion of "viral" licensing terms to express his concern over the fact that the GNU General Public License (GPL) license employed by such software requires that all derivative software be under the GPL or a compatible license.

Lucovsky/Google

In 2005, Mark Lucovsky alleged in a sworn statement to a Washington state court that Ballmer became highly enraged upon hearing that Lucovsky was about to leave Microsoft for Google, picked up his chair, and threw it across his office. Referring to Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who previously worked for competitors Sun and Novell), Ballmer allegedly said, "Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google," then resumed trying to persuade Lucovsky to stay at Microsoft.¹⁹²⁰ Ballmer has described the incident as a "gross exaggeration of what actually took place."²⁰

Sports

On March 6, 2008 Seattle's Mayor announced that a local ownership group involving Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made a "game changing" commitment to invest $150 million in cash toward a $300 million renovation of Key Arena and are ready to purchase the Seattle SuperSonics in order to keep them in the City of Seattle. ²¹ Ballmer would join fellow Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen (owner of the Portland Trail Blazers) as an NBA owner.

Media portrayals

• Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft (2002), Fredric Alan Maxwell, ISBN 0-06-621014-3 (unauthorized biography)
• The 1999 docudrama Pirates of Silicon Valley features Ballmer as a major character; he is played by actor John DiMaggio.
• Michael Maccoby qualified him as a "productive obsessive" and the one keeping Microsoft's "show on the road" so Bill Gates could think about the big picture.²²

Notes

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steve Ballmer

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steve Ballmer

• Corporate biography
• Forbes World's Richest People listing
• South China Morning Post audio interview
• Steve Ballmer Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show February 23, 2005

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