Through the years, owning shares of Microsoft has made many investors rich—and turned company executives into billionaires. But Microsoft’s richest individual shareholders aren’t necessarily who you might think. Although he’s vowed to give most of his fortune away, Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and longtime CEO, still owns approximately $55 billion worth of MSFT shares as of October 2026. And the company’s current CEO, Satya Nadella, has an ownership stake valued around just around $489 million. But there’s another Microsoft leader who owns considerably more stock than either Gates or Nadella—that’s Steve Ballmer, who ran the company from 2000 to 2014. In fact, Ballmer is Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, with an estimated stake worth around $170 billion. How much of Microsoft does Ballmer own? Because Ballmer is no longer a Microsoft executive or a member of its board of directors, and his holdings are below the 5% disclosure threshold required by the SEC, it is difficult to tell exactly how many shares of MSFT the former CEO still owns. We can, however, follow his paper trail of news reports and SEC filings, starting with Ballmer’s SEC Form 4 filed after he stepped down from the company in 2014. In this disclosure, Ballmer reported that he owned 333,254,734 shares of MSFT. Ballmer also appears in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, which estimates that he had sold approximately 14 million shares to help finance his $2 billion purchase of the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014. Subtract 14 million and we get approximately 319 million MSFT shares held, which the consensus estimate of Ballmer’s current holdings. In 2024, Ballmer told The Wall Street Journal that “The only stock I really study still is Microsoft, because that’s still overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly the No. 1 thing that I own.” In 2025, Ballmer spoke with GeekWire, which reported that he remained Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder. And while Ballmer has also made sizable charitable donations and grants through the Ballmer Group, Bloomberg notes that it had deducted more than $2 billion from his estimated cash holdings to account for charitable giving. Assuming Ballmer continues to hold roughly 319 million shares of Microsoft in 2026, and using MSFT’s October 21, 2026 closing price of $532.95, that would put the value of his stake at approximately $170 billion, or around 4.3% of outstanding shares. How & when did Ballmer accumulate his Microsoft stock? Under Ballmer, Microsoft’s annual revenue grew from $25 billion to nearly $80 billion, and its net income soared over 200%. He helped to spearhead the company’s foray into the Cloud, oversaw the acquisition of Skype, and launched the Xbox gaming system and Bing search engine. But Ballmer also made some epic missteps, including misunderstanding the importance of open-source technology, overseeing a disastrous launch of Windows 8, and actually laughing at the Apple iPhone when it was introduced in 2007, saying, “there’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” Ballmer’s last major acquisition as CEO came in 2013, when Microsoft agreed to purchase Nokia’s mobile phone business. The deal resulted in billions in write-downs and thousands of layoffs, and Ballmer stepped down as CEO ins February 2014. He left Microsoft’s board of directors later that year. So, how did he acquire such a large stake in Microsoft? To answer that, we must go back in time—way back, to 1980. Ballmer was Microsoft’s 30th employee and its first business manager. He had previously lived down the hall from Bill Gates at Harvard, and while Ballmer was pursuing his MBA at Stanford, Gates offered him a job to help manage his business. Ballmer’s base salary was $50,000 plus 10% of the company’s profit growth. As the business took off, Microsoft reorganized into a corporation in 1981, and Ballmer agreed to trade his profit-sharing for an 8% ownership stake. Microsoft’s other co-founder, Paul Allen, initially objected to Ballmer receiving such a large stake. But Gates agreed to give up a portion of his own ownership to make things work out. In 2003, in order to diversify his portfolio, Ballmer sold 39.3 million MSFT shares for approximately $955 million. This reduced his ownership stake down to around 4%. Microsoft’s largest institutional shareholders Even though Ballmer is estimated to hold roughly 4% of MSFT’s outstanding shares in 2026, institutional investors have an even greater stake in the tech giant. According to Microsoft’s latest Proxy Statement, Vanguard Capital Management holds 555,988,240 shares, or 7.48% of Microsoft. More on CEO wealth: Steve Jobs’ net worth: How rich Apple’s founder could have been Warren Buffett’s net worth: A look at his fortune in retirement Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth: How the Facebook founder hit $200 billion BlackRock Inc. holds 540,020,228 shares, or approximately 7.30% of the company’s total outstanding shares. As of MSFT’s October 21 close, Vanguard’s stake is worth $296.3 billion, and BlackRock’s approximately $287.8 billion. Together, they own $584.1 billion of Microsoft stock.
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