Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer is the high-wattage former CEO of Microsoft, who led the company from 2000 to 2014.He joined Microsoft in 1980 as employee No. 30 after dropping out of Stanford's MBA program.Ballmer oversaw Microsoft at a difficult time-after the first dot.com crash and through efforts to catch Google in search and Apple in mobile phones.The same year he retired from Microsoft he bought the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion.He has ramped up his philanthropy since 2014, putting over $2 billion into a donor-advised fund, with a focus on lifting Americans out of poverty.