For the first time in history, a former Microsoft employee is richer than Bill Gates

When mentioning Microsoft, many people will immediately think of Bill Gates - the company's founder. He is also the person who has held the title of "richest person in the world" for the longest time and is the richest person to have ever worked at Microsoft.

However, recently there was a person who worked for Microsoft who for the first time owned more assets than Bill Gates, and that was Steve Ballmer, Gates' close friend.

Accordingly, Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, became the 6th richest person in the world with his assets skyrocketing to 158 billion USD. Bill Gates dropped to 7th place on the list of the richest people on the planet.

Steve Ballmer is currently richer than Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or Nvidia president Jensen Huang.

Steve Ballmer's wealth growth is thanks to Microsoft's impressive stock price increase this year. Although Ballmer left the company a long time ago, 90% of his assets are Microsoft shares. Since January until now, Microsoft's stock price has increased 22%.

Steve Ballmer is a close friend of Bill Gates, joining Microsoft in 1980 as the 30th employee and the company's first business manager.

Ballmer joined Microsoft with a salary of $50,000 and 10% of the company's profits, without receiving any shares of the company. However, Ballmer traded the profit bonus in exchange for 8% of Microsoft shares.

In 2000, Steve Ballmer became the second CEO at Microsoft, replacing Bill Gates. Ballmer has led the company through many stages of development and launched many successful products such as Windows XP, Windows 7, Xbox game console. bringing Microsoft deeper into the hardware and cloud services market.

In February 2014, Ballmer left Microsoft and he still holds 4% of shares in Microsoft, while company founder Bill Gates only holds 1% of shares.

With a fortune of 158 billion USD, he is also the only person to achieve a fortune of over 100 billion USD from an employee position, instead of a company founder.

Samuel Daniel

Update 04 July 2024