Steve Ballmer, the billionaire whose need to win just cost him a year away from the Clippers

Steve Ballmer

Photo: D.Begley / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 24, 1956 Detroit
Occupation	Entrepreneur
Awards	Knight of the Legion of Honour

The loudest man in American business has been told to go quiet. Steve Ballmer paid for every seat, screen and steel beam of the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, and for the next twelve months the NBA forbids him from taking any part in running the team that plays there. The sanction falls on a man whose public life has been one trait pushed to its limit: a refusal to lose, and a readiness to pay almost any price to avoid it. At Microsoft that appetite made him one of the richest people on the planet. In Los Angeles it has just earned him one of the harshest penalties the league has ever handed an owner.

The appetite has a Midwestern origin. His father, Frederic Ballmer, was a Swiss immigrant who worked as a manager at Ford; his mother, Beatrice Dworkin, was Jewish. Ballmer, born in Detroit in March 1956, grew up in suburban Farmington Hills and spent three childhood years in Brussels. The boy who would later bellow at arena-sized crowds was so shy that he hyperventilated before Hebrew school. He graduated as valedictorian of Detroit Country Day School with a perfect score on the SAT’s mathematics section.

At Harvard he studied applied mathematics and economics, graduated magna cum laude and lived down the hall from a sophomore named Bill Gates. He spent two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, sharing an office with Jeff Immelt, the future head of General Electric, then enrolled at Stanford’s business school, which he left in 1980 to join Gates’s small software company.

He arrived as employee number 30 and the first business manager in a company of programmers, paid a salary plus a cut of the profit he generated. The cut grew so fast it was converted into equity: when Microsoft incorporated he owned 8% of it. Over two decades he ran operations, systems development and sales. He became president in 1998 and, in January 2000, took the chief executive’s job from Gates, who kept the chairmanship and the title of chief software architect.

The numbers from his fourteen years in charge still start arguments. Annual revenue rose from about $25 billion to roughly $70 billion and net income more than tripled. He built the server business on which Microsoft’s cloud would later stand, made Xbox a real division, bought Skype and, near the end, Nokia’s phone unit, a deal he later called the toughest decision of his tenure. Yet the share price barely moved for a decade, and the company that had owned the personal computer watched the smartphone era from the outside.

That is the charge that sticks. In 2007 he laughed off the iPhone as an expensive phone without a keyboard that had no chance of significant market share, a clip that has followed him ever since. In 2012 the hedge-fund manager David Einhorn called for his removal, arguing that Ballmer himself was the biggest weight on the stock. His own defence is narrower than his critics allow: he says he misread Apple‘s business model rather than the device, failing to see that carriers would fold its price into monthly bills. The sweat-soaked chant of “developers” and the leap across the stage shouting “I love this company” turned a disciplined operator into a meme. When he announced his retirement in 2013, Microsoft’s stock went up.

Even his partnership with Gates, close enough that Ballmer was best man at his wedding, ended in distance. Ballmer has said the two drifted apart after he pushed into phone hardware that Gates did not support. Satya Nadella replaced him in February 2014, and Ballmer left the board that August.

By then he had found his next obsession. After failing twice to bring the NBA back to Seattle, he bid $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers, put up for sale after Donald Sterling was banned from the league over recorded racist remarks. It was more than triple the highest price ever paid for an NBA team, and the purchase went through in August 2014. In Los Angeles he spent on anyone who could help him win, bought the Forum in Inglewood to clear the way for a home of his own and then built the Intuit Dome, a roughly $2 billion arena financed without public money that opened in August 2024. A 2020 survey by The Athletic named him the best owner in basketball.

The league has now punished that same appetite. After the journalist Pablo Torre reported that Kawhi Leonard had been paid through an endorsement deal with Aspiration, a green-finance start-up tied to the Clippers, the NBA hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate. Its findings, announced on September 2, 2026, concluded that Ballmer had knowingly sought to help Leonard obtain off-court income and approved a business deal he knew was a precondition for Aspiration’s endorsement agreement with the player. The penalties: a one-year suspension from all league and team activities, a $30 million fine, the loss of five first-round picks from 2029 to 2033, and suspensions for team presidents Gillian Zucker and Lawrence Frank. Ballmer had insisted the Clippers were victims of a fraud by Aspiration’s co-founder.

At first the Clippers said they vehemently rejected the findings and would fight them through every available avenue. Twelve days later Ballmer changed course. On September 14 he said the fine had been paid, apologised to fans, employees and fellow owners for “the distraction and distress” and accepted responsibility as principal owner, while noting that disagreements with the report remain. That same day Leonard’s long-delayed trade to the Toronto Raptors was completed. John Gibson, a Los Angeles lawyer and longtime season-ticket holder, now runs the franchise as interim governor and chief executive.

Away from the court, Ballmer remains Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, with roughly 4% of the company, a stake that places him among the fifteen richest people in the world. With his wife Connie, whom he married in 1990 and with whom he has three sons, he runs Ballmer Group, a philanthropy aimed at economic mobility for children in Washington state, Los Angeles County and Detroit. In 2017 he launched USAFacts, a nonprofit that publishes government data in plain form, and in 2022 the couple gave $425 million to the University of Oregon for a children’s behavioural health institute. ProPublica has reported how sports-team accounting and loss-harvesting trades have lowered his tax bill; the donor and the dealmaker are the same man.

The suspension runs until September 2027. What it tests is whether a man who has never been able to stand still on a stage can sit out a full season, and whether the owner who returns will still pay whatever winning costs, or will have found a price he refuses.

Tags: business, microsoft, ceos, nba, Bill Gates, business leaders, Kawhi Leonard, Los Angeles Clippers, Steve Ballmer

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