According to Bloomberg's billionaire rankings, Steve Ballmer's net worth increased by approximately $24 billion in 2024, reaching $154 billion, placing him in seventh position. He is now only $3 billion behind Gates, who is in sixth place with $157 billion, compared to $17 billion in the summer of 2023.

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Steve Ballmer (right) and Bill Gates at Microsoft's annual shareholders meeting on November 14, 2006. At the time, Ballmer was CEO and Gates was Chairman of Microsoft. Photo: Bloomberg

Ballmer is wealthier than many well-known billionaires including Larry Ellison of Oracle ($153 billion), Sergey Brin of Alphabet ($148 billion), Warren Buffett ($135 billion), Michael Dell ($120 billion), and Jensen Huang of Nvidia ($115 billion).

He joined Microsoft in 1980 as an assistant to the president, despite having previously been a business executive. Initially, he negotiated a base salary of $50,000 plus 10% of the profits he generated, but when the profit margin became too large, he agreed to exchange it for a large amount of equity stock, according to Forbes.

Gates' trusted advisor rose to become CEO of Microsoft in 2000. According to legal records, he retired in 2014 with 333 million shares, equivalent to 4% of the company's stock.

Bloomberg assumes he retained most of those shares, yielding over $150 billion based on Microsoft's stock price. He also likely received billions of dollars in dividends over the years.

Ballmer's wealth has skyrocketed over the past year, largely due to the artificial intelligence boom, which has driven up Microsoft's stock price. Microsoft's investment in OpenAI – the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot – is expected to help the Windows maker surpass Google in internet search.

According to Insider, Ballmer's wealth is quite different from the top 10 richest people on the Bloomberg list. Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, and the rest amassed their wealth through stakes in companies they founded or still run, while Ballmer is neither the founder nor the current CEO of Microsoft.

If Ballmer surpasses Gates, who has donated a significant amount of money to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charities, it would be a truly rare case of an employee becoming wealthier than their boss.

(According to Insider)