Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen Alejandro86 for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, October 31 (Xinhua) Steve Ballmer (Steve Ballmer), a former assistant to Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft CEO, is now one of the richest men in the world, and his wealth may soon surpass that of the world-famous Microsoft co-founder and his former boss.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Ballmer's wealth rose by about $29 billion this year to $115 billion (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 841.8 billion yuan), ranking fifth in the world. He is now only $6 billion less than Gates (fourth with $121 billion), up from $17 billion three months ago. Ballmer is currently richer than Larry Ellison ($114 billion), Warren Buffett ($111 billion), Larry Page ($110 billion), Mark Zuckerberg ($108 billion) and Sergey Brin ($105 billion).

Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 as assistant to the president, but he was more of a business manager than a personal assistant. His initial salary was a base salary of $50,000 plus 10% of the increase in his profits, and then his profits were split too high, and he agreed to exchange them for a sizeable stake.

As a close confidant of Gates, Ballmer was gradually promoted to CEO of Microsoft and retired in 2014. He retired with 333 million shares, or 4 per cent, of Microsoft, according to regulatory filings. Bloomberg assumes that he retains a majority of his shares, which are worth more than $100 billion based on Microsoft's current share price. Over the years, he may have received billions of dollars in dividends.

Mr Ballmer's wealth has soared this year in part because the boom in artificial intelligence has driven up Microsoft's share price, which has risen 38 per cent in the past 10 months.

CTOnews.com notes that Ballmer is a special case among the top 10 people on the Bloomberg Rich list. Elon Musk, Bernard Arnott, Jeff Bezos and others all got rich by taking stakes in companies they founded or still operated, while Ballmer was neither the founder nor the current CEO of Microsoft.

If he can overtake Gates, it will be a very rare situation in which an employee ends up richer than the founder of his company.

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