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Steve Ballmer is on track to collect $1 billion (€927 million) in annual dividend payments from Microsoft.
He is the former CEO of Microsoft and the software giant’s single largest shareholder.
Ballmer’s Microsoft stake has risen to a value of $128 billion (118.6 billion euros) this year after Microsoft shares rose 55 percent.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor.
Microsoft is on track to pay former CEO Steve Ballmer an annual dividend of about $1 billion (927 million euros). Ballmer, who is currently the sixth richest person in the world, is the largest individual shareholder in Microsoft. At the time of his last shareholding disclosure in 2014, he owned 333,2 million Microsoft shares, which corresponds to about four percent of the company.
Today, according to Bloomberg’s billionaire index, his share is worth $128 billion (118.6 billion euros), having gained $42 billion (just under 39 billion euros) in wealth this year thanks to a 55 percent rise in Microsoft shares has.
Ballmer amassed his share over his 34-year career at Microsoft, having joined the company in 1980 as employee number 30. In 2000, just before the peak of the dot-com bubble, he became CEO of Microsoft. 2014 He resigned when current CEO Satya Nadella took over the reins of the company.
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Microsoft increases its dividend
Microsoft paid a dividend of $2.79 (€2.59) per share in 2023, representing an annual dividend payout of approximately $930 million (€862 million) to Ballmer based on his ownership stake in the company.
This payout will increase in 2024 as Microsoft recently increased its dividend by ten percent to three US dollars (2.78 euros) per share per year. That would equate to an annual dividend payout of $999.6 million (€926.5 million) to Ballmer in 2024, and could be even higher if Microsoft continues its trend of increasing its dividend payout every year.
Microsoft has increased its dividend payout for 18 consecutive years, so it is likely that Ballmer’s annual dividend payout will exceed $1 billion in 2024 and continue to rise in the coming years.
Ballmer’s massive stake in Microsoft has put him close to being the fourth richest person in the world, as he is only a few billion US dollars behind Larry Ellison and his former boss Bill Gates.
Since leaving the company, Gates has diversified his assets significantly, away from Microsoft and toward cash and other public stocks. In 2014, Gates still owned around four percent of Microsoft with a stake of 330 million shares. But multiple divestitures over the years have left Gates owning just over one percent of the software giant.
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