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Halcyon Days
steve-ballmerCringely - 11 years ago
… and this is something I never knew - did you ?
“In the late 1980s, when Microsoft was approaching the release of Windows 3.0 — the first version of the software to do more or less what it claimed — Ballmer borrowed almost $50 million against his Microsoft stock and anything else he owned, using the money to buy more Microsoft shares. Software tycoons don’t do things like this. They don’t buy shares in their company, they sell them. Gates has never bought a single share of Microsoft, but Ballmer did, and that $50 million grew over the following decade to more than $14 billion, earning him the CEO job he has today. Ballmer, more than any other Microsoft employee, is literally invested in his job.”