Steve Ballmer

#1In 1980, Steve Ballmer was at Stanford working toward an MBA. He'd already graduated from Harvard, spent time at Procter & Gamble, and gone back to school.

#2Then his old Harvard friend Bill Gates called.

#3Drop out. Come work for my company.

#4The company was Microsoft.

#5Not the Microsoft we know now, of course. It had only a few dozen employees. And Ballmer wasn't a programmer. He'd later say that when he joined, he barely knew anything about personal computers.

#6That wasn't necessarily a problem. It was part of the reason Gates wanted him.

#7Gates already had Paul Allen as his technical co-founder. What the growing company increasingly needed was someone who could deal with everything that came with becoming an actual organization: hiring people, handling money, building the business, and getting a fast-growing group of employees to work as one company.

#8Ballmer joined as Microsoft's first business manager. When Microsoft incorporated the next year, he also ended up with a substantial ownership stake.

#9Then he and Gates started fighting.

#10Ballmer looked around and decided Microsoft needed another 17 or 18 people. Gates thought hiring that fast might bankrupt them. They eventually compromised by tying hiring to revenue growth, but the argument got bad enough that Ballmer considered leaving.

#11So Gates had to sell his friend on Microsoft all over again.

#12He described the future he could see: a computer on every desk and in every home. Microsoft, he told Ballmer, could become enormous.

#13Ballmer stayed.

#14That decision changed both of their lives.

#15Ballmer had spotted something early.

#16Microsoft's opportunity was growing faster than Microsoft itself.

#17Then the IBM PC arrived, Microsoft's operating-system business took off, and Ballmer's job kept expanding. He moved through operating systems, sales, support, and other leadership roles until he was sitting near the center of the business.

#18He wasn't the guy writing Microsoft's code.

#19He was helping build the company where all those programmers could work.

#20By 1998, Ballmer was president. Gates was spending more of his time on technology and products, while Ballmer took on more of the day-to-day management.

#21Then, in 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO.

#22The job went to the college friend who'd almost walked out twenty years earlier.

#23Steve Ballmer was now running Microsoft.

#24Gates stayed on as chairman and Chief Software Architect, but something fundamental had changed. Ballmer had spent years thinking of himself as the junior half of the Gates-Ballmer partnership. Now the company was ultimately his to run.

#25And that's where the job got harder.

#26Scaling someone else's enormous vision is one thing. Deciding where an already enormous company needs to go next is another.

#27It's hard to call Ballmer's Microsoft a failed company.

#28Windows and Office threw off huge profits. The enterprise and server businesses grew. Microsoft remained one of the most profitable technology companies on the planet.

#29And that was exactly what made the next problem so tricky.

#30Microsoft's empire had been built around the PC. Manufacturers made the computers, Windows ran on them, and software like Office sat on top. For years, that model worked spectacularly well.

#31Then the computer started moving into people's pockets.

#32In 2007, Apple unveiled the iPhone.

#33When Ballmer was asked about it in an interview, he laughed. He pointed to the $500 price and questioned how attractive a phone without a physical keyboard would be to business users who cared about email.

#34It's an ugly clip in hindsight.

#35But it also makes the story look simpler than it was. Microsoft wasn't unaware of mobile. It already had Windows Mobile.

#36The real problem was figuring out what kind of phone was about to become the next computer.

#37Apple tied the hardware, software, and app ecosystem together. Google's Android built another huge ecosystem. Microsoft, meanwhile, struggled to move fast enough beyond the Windows-centered model that had made it so successful.

#38So Microsoft ended up in a strange position.

#39It was still making extraordinary amounts of money.

#40It just wasn't at the center of the devices that increasingly looked like the future.

#41The easy version of this story goes like this: Ballmer laughed at the iPhone, did nothing, and lost.

#42That's not what happened.

#43Microsoft pushed Windows Phone. It launched Surface and entered the PC hardware business itself. But Windows Phone stayed small, and the first Surface products struggled badly enough that Microsoft took a roughly $900 million charge related to Surface RT inventory.

#44Ballmer started looking at the organization itself.

#45In 2013, he launched a major restructuring called "One Microsoft." The idea was to stop divisions from behaving like separate kingdoms and get the company moving around one strategy.

#46Then, just weeks later, Ballmer announced that he'd retire as CEO within twelve months.

#47It's too neat to say the board simply fired him for missing mobile. Microsoft was dealing with a slowing PC market, the reception to Windows 8, Surface losses, its weak smartphone position, and mounting investor pressure all at once.

#48Ballmer's public explanation was that Microsoft was beginning a long transformation, and it needed a CEO who could stay long enough to lead the whole thing.

#49Then came one more twist.

#50Soon after announcing his departure, Ballmer led Microsoft into a deal to buy Nokia's phone business.

#51The CEO remembered for missing mobile wasn't walking away from mobile at the end.

#52He was making one of Microsoft's biggest mobile bets yet.

#53Just very late.

#54Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014.

#55Ballmer's last big Nokia bet didn't last. The next year, Microsoft announced a roughly $7.6 billion impairment related to the phone business and thousands of layoffs. Eventually, its attempt to become a major smartphone operating-system platform was effectively over.

#56Microsoft itself wasn't.

#57Under Nadella, the center of the company shifted more decisively toward cloud computing and subscriptions. Azure and Office 365 grew. Microsoft became increasingly comfortable putting its software on iPhones and Android phones instead of insisting that Microsoft's own operating system sit underneath everything.

#58The company took off again.

#59But "Ballmer wrecked Microsoft and Nadella saved it" doesn't really fit the facts either. Some of the enterprise and cloud foundations Nadella built on had grown during Ballmer's years, and Ballmer's Microsoft had never stopped making enormous profits.

#60There was another twist for Ballmer personally.

#61He'd kept a large amount of Microsoft stock.

#62So when Microsoft became dramatically more valuable after he stepped down, Ballmer became dramatically richer too.

#63He could've spent the rest of his life managing his money.

#64Instead, he wanted a basketball team.

#65Ballmer didn't suddenly discover the NBA after leaving Microsoft.

#66In 2013, while he was still CEO, he joined an investor group trying to buy the Sacramento Kings and move them to Seattle. The idea was to bring NBA basketball back to a city that had lost the SuperSonics.

#67The NBA rejected the relocation.

#68Ballmer didn't get the team.

#69Then, about a year later, an opportunity appeared that nobody could've scheduled.

#70Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was recorded making racist remarks. The NBA banned him for life and moved toward a sale of the franchise.

#71Suddenly, the Clippers were available.

#72This time Ballmer made it very hard to outbid him.

#73Other groups were offering around $1.2 billion and $1.6 billion.

#74Ballmer offered $2 billion.

#75For an NBA franchise at the time, that number was staggering. Plenty of people wondered whether he'd massively overpaid.

#76But NBA teams don't go on sale whenever a billionaire feels like buying one. Ballmer had already missed the Kings. Now a team in Los Angeles had unexpectedly become available under extraordinary circumstances.

#77To Ballmer, it looked like a once-in-a-lifetime opening.

#78He paid the $2 billion.

#79This time, he got his team.

#80Ballmer was never going to be a quiet owner.

#81At one of his first big appearances in front of Clippers fans, he tore around the stage shouting with the same kind of energy people remembered from his Microsoft days.

#82But he wanted to change more than the atmosphere.

#83The Clippers had a very large neighbor.

#84The Los Angeles Lakers.

#85For years, the two teams shared an arena. But in Los Angeles, the Lakers came with generations of championships, stars, and cultural weight. The Clippers were playing in the same building without anything close to the same identity.

#86Ballmer wanted a home that belonged to the Clippers.

#87So he built one in Inglewood.

#88Intuit Dome.

#89He spent more than $2 billion on it, and he obsessed over details most owners might've handed to somebody else. What could fans see from their seats? How should the enormous video board work? How much basketball would people miss because they were waiting for a bathroom?

#90He even created "The Wall," a section designed to pack the loudest home fans together.

#91Intuit Dome opened in 2024.

#92The Clippers finally had a house that wasn't the Lakers' house too.

#93Then they lost their first four games there.

#94Ballmer joked to the players that if they lost the fifth one, maybe something was wrong with the building and he'd have to build another arena.

#95They won the fifth.

#96Two billion dollars to buy the team. More than two billion more to build its home.

#97By then, the Clippers unmistakably looked like Ballmer's organization.

#98Before the new arena opened, Ballmer needed something else.

#99A player who could win a championship.

#100In 2019, the Clippers landed Kawhi Leonard. Leonard had already won Finals MVP in San Antonio, then gone to Toronto and led the Raptors to the first NBA championship in franchise history.

#101Now he was a Clipper.

#102Years later, money connected to that same star would become the biggest crisis of Ballmer's ownership.

#103One of the companies at the center of the questions was Aspiration.

#104Ballmer personally invested tens of millions of dollars in the company. Aspiration also signed a major sponsorship deal with the Clippers. Leonard, meanwhile, had an endorsement agreement with Aspiration.

#105Then Aspiration collapsed.

#106Documents emerging from its bankruptcy raised a question about Leonard's deal. Was this really payment for an endorsement? Or was it effectively extra compensation designed to get around the NBA's salary cap—the system that limits how much teams can spend on players?

#107In 2025, the NBA opened an investigation.

#108Ballmer denied wrongdoing. He said he'd been deceived by Aspiration's leadership too, and maintained that he didn't know the details of Leonard's agreement.

#109The investigation ran for nearly a year.

#110On September 2, 2026, the NBA announced its findings.

#111And the league's case went beyond one Aspiration deal.

#112According to the NBA investigation, the Clippers had helped Leonard obtain off-court income opportunities involving several companies that did business with the team. The league said the Clippers helped facilitate endorsement deals and used team business relationships to create those opportunities.

#113The NBA called it a pattern of misconduct, not a one-off mistake.

#114It also pointed to institutional and leadership failures inside the Clippers.

#115And the findings reached Ballmer himself.

#116According to the league, Ballmer knowingly sought to help Leonard obtain off-court income, approved an Aspiration-related business deal while knowing it was tied to an endorsement arrangement for Leonard, and failed to create conditions that would keep the organization in compliance with the NBA's anti-circumvention rules.

#117The punishment was enormous.

#118The Clippers were fined $30 million. They lost five consecutive first-round draft picks, from 2029 through 2033. Senior executives were suspended, and the organization was placed under five years of compliance monitoring.

#119Steve Ballmer was suspended from all league and team activities for one year.

#120The Clippers strongly reject the NBA's conclusions. That's important. This isn't an uncontested finding that Ballmer illegally paid Leonard. It's the conclusion reached by an NBA investigation, followed by league sanctions, and the Clippers dispute that conclusion.

#121But for Ballmer, one thing was immediate.

#122He had to spend a year away from the team he'd paid $2 billion for and spent years rebuilding around himself.

#123Think back to Ballmer's first big fight at Microsoft in 1980.

#124It was about people.

#125Ballmer thought Microsoft needed to hire fast enough to catch the opportunity in front of it. Gates worried that growing the organization too quickly could kill the company.

#126Ballmer almost left.

#127Gates talked him into staying.

#128Then Ballmer hired, sold, managed, and scaled. A company with a few dozen people became one of the most important corporations in the world, and the guy who wasn't a programmer eventually became its CEO.

#129But once Microsoft became enormous, the problem changed. Scaling wasn't enough anymore. Somebody had to decide where an immensely successful organization should go when the world around it changed.

#130Microsoft kept printing money while personal computing shifted toward smartphones. Ballmer reorganized the company, moved into hardware, and eventually made the huge Nokia bet.

#131But he wasn't the CEO who completed Microsoft's next transformation.

#132After Microsoft, he got another organization.

#133This one he bought with his own money.

#134He bought the Clippers, brought in stars, reshaped the business, and built the team a home from the ground up.

#135Then, in 2026, the language of organization came back.

#136The NBA said the Clippers had suffered institutional and leadership failures. It cited Ballmer's own conduct and his failure to ensure organizational compliance, and suspended him for one year.

#137That isn't the end of Steve Ballmer's story.

#138He still owns the Clippers. He wasn't banned for life.

#139It's one year.

#140In 1980, Ballmer was preparing to walk away from a tiny Microsoft when Gates persuaded him to stay.

#141Forty-six years later, after a lifetime spent building and running organizations, Ballmer found himself outside one he'd built around himself.

#142And this time, when the year is over, he can come back.

#143Paul Allen eventually became an NBA owner too. That means two men from the same tiny early Microsoft ended up owning teams in the same basketball league decades later. How did their paths from one software company lead to two very different lives in professional sports?