Imagine making $1 Billion dollars a year for not doing a damn thing!
That’s the reality for one fortunate man named Steve Ballmer. You may have heard of him before. He was employee number 30 at Microsoft back in 1980. Over time he rose through the ranks at Microsoft to eventually become CEO and lead the company from 2000 to 2014.
Over that time he was awarded stock options, as many in the tech industry customarily receive as a form of financial compensation. As of 2014 he owned 333.2 million shares of Microsoft, which actually represents 4% of the company’s stock, making him the largest individual shareholder – owning even more than Bill Gates or the late Paul Allen who both co-founded Microsoft. Random fact: Steve Ballmer actually hasn’t sold any of his Microsoft stock since he left Microsoft in 2014 when he retired as CEO of the company.
Each year Microsoft pays out a dividend quarterly. In 2023 Microsoft had a Dividend Yield of
0.80% or $0.75 cents per share, which comes out to an Annual Dividend of $3.00, which is the total amount of dividends paid out to shareholders in a year for each share of Microsoft they own.
If Steve Ballmer owns 333.2 million shares of Microsoft, and the company pays $3.00 a year in Annual Dividends per share owned, then that means that he means he’ll make $999,600,000 in dividends a year (which for rounding purposes we’ll just call $1 Billion dollars since that sounds better in an e-Newsletter).
The stock symbol for Microsoft is MSFT (which I still have memorized from my days of daytrading back in college, but I digress). Right now Microsoft’s stock is trading at $370.87 at the time of writing this article. That means that Steve Ballmer’s 333.2 million shares of Microsoft are worth $123,573,884,000 or $123.6 Billion dollars with a capital B!
You know who else is probably excited about Steve Ballmer’s big payday? If you guessed the IRS you’d be right. You better believe Uncle Sam will be waiting with his grubby hand out waiting for his own payday. Assuming that Steve Ballmer pays the typical 20% tax rate on capital gains, then he’ll owe the IRS $200 million dollars in taxes on the dividends he gets paid by Microsoft. That leaves Steve Ballmer a little bit poorer, but no one is shedding a tear for the guy who just made $800 Million dollars with a capital M after taxes for doing nothing except owning a ton of Microsoft shares!
Steve Ballmer is set to make $1 billion a year for doing nothing