Steve Ballmer Earning $1 Billion in Annual Dividend Payments

^{This text initially appeared on Business Insider.}

Microsoft is on observe to pay former CEO Steve Ballmer about $1 billion in annual dividend funds.

Ballmer, who’s at the moment the sixth richest individual on the planet, is the most important particular person shareholder in Microsoft. As of his final possession disclosure in 2014, Ballmer owned 333.2 million shares of Microsoft, representing about 4% of the corporate.

At this time, his stake is value $128 billion, in response to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, after gaining $42 billion in wealth this 12 months due to a 55% rally in Microsoft’s inventory value.

Ballmer amassed his stake over the course of his 34-year profession at Microsoft, having joined the corporate in 1980 as worker quantity 30. He went on to change into CEO of Microsoft in 2000, close to the height of the dot-com bubble, and stepped down in 2014 when current CEO Satya Nadella took over the top role.

Microsoft paid $2.79 in dividends per share in 2023, which equates to an annual dividend cost of about $930 million to Ballmer primarily based on his stake within the firm.

That payout is ready to extend in 2024, as Microsoft lifted its dividend 10% not too long ago to pay $3 per share a 12 months. That will equate to an annual dividend cost of $999.6 million to Ballmer in 2024, and it may very well be even larger assuming Microsoft continues its pattern of mountaineering its dividend cost yearly.

Microsoft has elevated its dividend cost for 18 consecutive years, so its seemingly that Ballmer’s annual dividend payout will high $1 billion in 2024 and proceed to develop within the coming years.

Ballmer’s huge stake in Microsoft has put him inside spitting distance of changing into the fourth richest individual on the planet, as he’s just a few billion dollars behind Larry Ellison and his former boss, Bill Gates.

Gates has considerably diversified his wealth away from Microsoft and in direction of money and different public equities since he stepped down from the corporate. In actual fact, in 2014, Gates additionally owned about 4% of Microsoft, having a 330 million share stake within the firm. However a number of divestitures over time has led Gates to proudly owning simply over 1% of the software program big.