Steve Ballmer, the former assistant of Bill Gates at Microsoft, has risen rapidly in the ranking of the richest people in the world and may soon surpass the founder of Microsoft in terms of wealth, writes Markets Insider.

Ballmer’s fortune this year increased by about $29 billion, which puts him in fifth place in the ranking of billionaires compiled by the Bloomberg agency. Ballmer’s fortune is now 121 billion dollars, which is only 6 billion less than that of Gates, who ranks 4th in the ranking of the richest people on the planet.

Microsoft’s nearly $100 share price increase since the start of 2023 has made Ballmer richer than Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison ($114 billion), Berkshire Hathaway founder and CEO Warren Buffett ($110 billion), Google co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin ($110 and 105 billion, respectively) and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Meta/Facebook (108 billion).

Bill Gates hired Ballmer at Microsoft in 1980 as an “assistant to the president,” but his duties were more like those of a business manager than a personal assistant.

Ballmer negotiated a starting salary of $50,000 plus a bonus of 10 percent of the increased profits he generates. But he agreed to waive that clause after Microsoft’s profits skyrocketed, accepting a stake in the company instead, Forbes reported.

Gates’ trusted advisor gradually rose through the company, becoming Microsoft’s CEO in 2000. He retired in 2014 with 333 million shares in his portfolio, equivalent to a 4% stake in Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer is an anomaly among the world’s rich

Markets Insider also notes that Ballmer is an anomaly in the ranking of the 10 richest people on the planet. Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos and all the rest owe their fortunes to the companies they founded, some of which they still run. On the other hand, Ballmer is neither the founder nor the current head of Microsoft.

As for Gates, he stepped down from the Microsoft board 3 years ago, saying at the time that he wanted to focus on his philanthropic work.

But an investigation published by The Wall Street Journal a year later, after Gates and his wife Melinda divorced, found that Microsoft pressured him to make the decision after a company employee disclosed a relationship with him that lasted nearly two decades.

While Ballmer may soon surpass his former boss in terms of wealth, that’s because Bill Gates donated much of the Microsoft stock he owned to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he ran with his ex-wife.

If Gates had kept most of his Microsoft shares, he would currently be the richest person in the world, surpassing even Elon Musk, whose fortune Bloomberg estimates at $200 billion.

Paul Allen, the entrepreneur with whom Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975, died 5 years ago.