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| Birth Name(s) : Steve Ballmer |
Date of Birth: N/A |
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Full Steve Ballmer Biography
Steven Anthony Ballmer (born March 24, 1956 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American businessman and has been the chief executive officer of Microsoft Corporation since January 2000. Ballmer is the first person 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 its 2007 World's Richest People ranking, Forbes Magazine ranked Ballmer as the 31st richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth of $15 billion.
Steve Ballmer was born in March 1956, and grew up near Detroit, where his father worked as a manager at Ford Motor Co. He attended Detroit Country Day School in high school, and currently sits on the board. He graduated from Harvard University 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 university literary magazine, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates. After college, he worked for two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, the future CEO of General Electric. Before joining Microsoft, he attended Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
On October 4, 2007, Ballmer was awarded honorary citizenship of Lausen, Switzerland. His father, Frederick Balmer, who emigrated to the US at the age of 26, was a citizen of the same municipality.
Ballmer has headed several divisions within Microsoft, including Operating Systems Development, Operations, and Sales and Support. In July 1998, he was promoted to president, and on January 13, 2000, he was named chief executive officer when Bill Gates stepped down from that position.
While Gates retains control of technological vision, Ballmer handles company finances. In 2003, Ballmer sold 8.3% of his shareholdings, leaving him with a 4% stake in the company. The same year, Ballmer replaced Microsoft's employee stock options program, which had been instrumental in making early employees millionaires, with a stock grant program.
Ballmer is currently the longest-serving employee of Microsoft after Gates. Ballmer married Connie Snyder (an employee of Microsoft's public relations agency) and has three children. His wife is an aunt of former major league baseball player Ben Petrick.
Footage featuring Ballmer during on-stage appearances at Microsoft events have been widely circulated on the Internet, becoming what are known as "viral videos". The most famous of these is commonly titled "Dance Monkeyboy", and features Ballmer dancing around and screaming erratically on a stage for about 45 seconds after being introduced at a Microsoft employee convention. Another video, captured at a developers' conference just days later, featured a sweat-soaked Ballmer chanting the word "developers" fourteen times in front of the gathering.
According to one former employee's headline-grabbing allegations, this competitive nature has manifested itself more violently. 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. Referring to Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who previously worked for competitors Sun and Novell), Ballmer allegedly said "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." Shortly after, he resumed trying to persuade Lucovsky to stay at Microsoft. Ballmer has described Lucovsky's account of the incident as a "gross exaggeration of what actually took place." |
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