Microsoft’s origin story naturally spotlights Bill Gates, but the company’s share-registry in 2025 tells a very different tale about who actually owns the biggest personal slice of the tech titan. Gates, who once controlled nearly half of Microsoft at its 1986 IPO, has spent decades selling or donating stock and today holds roughly 1.3 % of the outstanding shares.
Former chief executive Steve Ballmer, by contrast, remains Microsoft’s single-largest individual shareholder with about 4.5 % of the company—more than three times Gates’s current stake. Ballmer first walked through Microsoft’s doors on June 11 1980 as employee No. 30 and its first business manager, arriving just five years after the firm’s founding and nearly two decades before assuming the top job. The simple arithmetic of the cap table therefore means that the most influential block of personal voting power in Redmond now sits with a man who started as an employee rather than a founder, defying the common assumption that Gates is still the dominant private holder of Microsoft stock.
Ballmer’s prominence on the shareholder list is paired with an outsized place in Microsoft’s operational history. Elevated to chief executive on January 13 2000 and serving until February 4 2014, he presided over a period in which annual revenue rocketed from about $25 billion to roughly $70 billion and net income more than doubled, even as the stock price often drifted.
His tenure saw the launch of Windows XP and Windows 7, the birth of the Xbox console line, the early build-out of Azure, and the shift of Office to a subscription model that ultimately became Office 365. He also approved headline acquisitions such as Skype and oversaw the growth of lucrative enterprise franchises like Exchange Server and SQL Server.
Critics fairly note the misfires—most notably the company’s late mobile strategy—but Ballmer’s exuberant, stadium-pep-rally leadership style kept Microsoft’s core businesses printing cash. That show-man persona produced one of tech’s most replayed clips: in 2007, days after Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, Ballmer laughed on camera at the idea that consumers would pay “five hundred dollars… for a phone without a keyboard,” a quip that has become a cautionary meme about underestimating rivals. Yet by the time he handed the reins to Satya Nadella, Microsoft had tripled sales, diversified well beyond Windows, and laid much of the groundwork for the cloud-first strategy that fuels its current $3-trillion-plus valuation. Today, while Gates devotes most of his energy to philanthropy, Ballmer continues to cheer from the sidelines—and, thanks to that 4-plus-percent stake, enjoys the loudest personal voice in Microsoft’s shareholder meetings.
