Steve Ballmer, former assistant to Bill Gates at Microsoft and later CEO of the software giant, is set to receive nearly $1 billion in dividends from the company this year, Markets Insider reports.

Ballmer, currently the world’s sixth-richest person with a fortune estimated by Bloomberg at $128 billion, is Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder with a 4 percent stake in the company.

His personal fortune has grown by $42 billion this year after Microsoft’s share price rose 55% since January 2023 on the back of a year of impressive returns for the US stock market, even if at one point it seemed headed for a less-than-glorious end to the year.

Ballmer became the owner of 333.2 million shares of Microsoft during his 34-year career with the company, having been hired in 1980 as “assistant to the chairman of the board” of Bill Gates, but his duties were more business managers than personal assistants. .

At that time, Ballmer was only the 30th employee of Microsoft. 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.

He became CEO of Microsoft in 2000 and left that position in 2014, when it was taken over by Satya Nadella, the software giant’s current chief executive.

Given that Microsoft has decided to pay a dividend of $2.79 per share in 2023, Markets Insider estimates that Ballmer will receive $930 million, including his stake in the company.

Steve Ballmer, an unusual billionaire

By the end of October, Ballmer even rose to the fifth position in the ranking of the richest people in the world, immediately yielding to Bill Gates, whose fortune at that time exceeded his former assistant by only 6 billion dollars.

While it seemed possible at the time that Ballmer would surpass Gates in terms of wealth, the gap between the two widened by another billion dollars in favor of the Microsoft founder.

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. Ballmer, on the other hand, is neither the founder nor the current CEO of Microsoft.

The reason why Ballmer is so close to his former boss at Microsoft in terms of their fortunes is that Bill Gates donated a large portion of the shares in the company he founded 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 be the richest person in the world today, surpassing even Elon Musk, whose fortune is now estimated by Bloomberg at $223 billion.