The Steve Ballmer Interview

Summary

Ben: David, Steve gave us the signed Clippers jersey with the name Acquired on it. There’s only one jersey. What are we going to do about this?David: Should we rock paper scissors for it? You know what? You keep it. There’s no Seattle basketball team. Keep it there up north.Ben: All right. It’ll go in the Acquired museum north. David: Great. Ben: Perfect. All right, let’s do it.David: Let’s do it.Ben: Welcome to episode one of the Summer 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I’m Ben Gilbert.David: I’m David Rosenthal.Ben: And we are your hosts. Steve Ballmer is, among other things, arguably the very best investor of the last 20 years. It sounds a little funny to frame it that way, but here are the numbers. In 2014 when Steve left Microsoft, his net worth was $20 billion, almost entirely comprised of Microsoft stock. Today, 11 years later, it is a staggering $130 billion according to Forbes. It is incredibly rare to reach this stratospheric level when you are: (a) not the founder of the company, and (b) no longer CEO or even employed by the company. And all of this comes from just one investment decision. Just keep holding substantially all of his Microsoft stock.David: Incredible. We chatted about it with him in the conversation to come.Ben: Now, as most of you know, we did a big two-part Microsoft series last year on the history of the company up through when Steve transitioned the CEO role to Satya Nadella. Steve listened to those episodes and he had some thoughts that he wanted to share with his recollection of how things went down. Things like what made Microsoft so fabulously successful, what his missteps were as CEO. We wanted to share that as a recorded conversation with all of you, so we set up our cameras and our mics at his philanthropy office, Ballmer Group, in Bellevue, Washington, and we pressed record. We’ll go into everything from the misses on mobile, search, social, the huge wins in ent...