Ballmer Set To Earn $1 Billion Annually From Microsoft Dividends

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is on pace to collect annual dividend payments of $1 billion from the company, where he is the biggest shareholder at 4%, as reported by Matthew Fox for Business Insider.

Ballmer amassed his stake over the course of his 34-year career at Microsoft, having joined the company in 1980 as employee number 30. I Photo: Microsoft Sweden Flickr

Ballmer, the sixth richest person in the world, owns 333.2 million shares of Microsoft. His stake is worth about $130 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, after gaining $44 billion in wealth this year thanks to a 56% rally in Microsoft's stock price.

Ballmer amassed his stake over the course of his 34-year career at Microsoft, having joined the company in 1980 as employee number 30.

He went on to become CEO of Microsoft in 2000, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, but left in 2014 when current CEO Satya Nadella took over the top role. Microsoft paid $2.79 in dividends per share in 2023, which equates to an annual dividend payment of about $930 million to Ballmer based on his stake in the company.

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