Steve Ballmer Interview
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Satya's mistake though is that he has filled Microsoft with average people. The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest. What is the impact of that? Microsoft's execution ability is lower, and we'll see the impact of that in the coming years.
Another of Satya's mistakes is his faux pas related to women employees. He was accused -- unfairly in my opinion -- of saying women employees should not ask for a raise. He did no such thing. He said employees should not ask for a raise (not women employees specifically) and instead should rely on the system to give you the appropriate raise at the appropriate time. But since he said that at a women's conference the accusation stood that he meant women employees specifically. Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees. Executive compensation at all levels at Microsoft is directly tied to promotion of women employees, and as a result, a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute.
Microsoft today is the second most valuable company behind Nvidia. But you wouldn't know that looking at their products. They don't have any interesting new products. To some extend they are coasting. Will their success continue into the next decade? It's going to be interesting to watch.
Is there a way to demonstrate that this actually mattered? That paying more did get them “better” talent that actually made a difference? Ie. not any self serving “they did because they’re better and they’re better because they were paid more.”
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/microsoft-tests-mai-1-previe...
That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies.
Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either.
Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
I think that point is fair - at the very least, Microsoft wasn’t in the conversation as far as where the typical CS grad wanted to work - FANG doesn’t even include Microsoft in the acronym (I kid, I realize this doesn’t actually mean anything)
I was pleasantly surprised by Llama.
I was pissed. Then Meta came out of nowhere to release Llama, a model with performance comparable to ChatGPT. I was able to download it & run it for free on my computer. Thank you Zucc, very cool.
PyTorch?
> Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
I don't disagree really, in the end all three suck: G, MS, FB. Google did in fact hire all the top talent but only to make sure they don't work on something good for someone else.
A few projects just in ML: DeepMind has plenty enough for Google alone but Jax and the TPU project are technically ambitious and very strategically important for Google; they hired Adam Paszke away from Meta. Besides Gemini they have Gemma and Veo and they have a reputation in the industry of having extremely high MFU averages. From Facebook there's PyTorch but that's a whole cluster of projects (compiler, abstractions for many accelerators, torchao, torchtitan). They're also famous for DINO and SAM models, as well as many others by FAIR (e.g. Mask R-CNN).
Fuck... I'm starting to sound like Schmidhuber
You mean small startups founded by experienced engineers?
I, in particular, used to use Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, and Gmail a decade ago. Now I don't, because the products have become unbearably worse.
One conspiracy theory I've heard is that because they were making so much money, they hired or at least recruited enough people so they would not have any serious competition.
Also, a lot of things that look straightforward is probably a lot of work internally. For example, renaming Facebook to meta was likely not a simple one point story, right?
Also, I bring this up every chance I get because it bothers me so much but making a worse product probably takes more effort in terms of man hours than making a good one. Look at this... .https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_...
> they’re trying to glue your eyeballs to your screen and they’ve done extremely well at that
I was saying that they haven't, in my experience. The number of products and the volume of work involved is important, but not relevant.
On the other hand Microsoft had a fire and passion that I don't really see anymore. I miss Developers, Developers, Developers. Now it's just ads, AI, blah.
He was really the epitome of that, and that was the MO of Microsoft at the time. I always thought of him as the embodiment of that, the pinnacle, the ne plus ultra.
Going on TV and laughing at the iPhone pretty much told me everything I needed to know about Ballmer. The best thing I can say about him is that unlike Nadella, he didn't spend too much of his time actively trying to enshittify Windows.
This is an important perception. Possibly due to general (and HN) bias towards talent and hero worship, this reality is overlooked at times. But at scale in a normal distribution, not all people will be within some stringent bounds of sigma. And companies once they become big will have some 'business to run'. Of course, on small scale I have seen a few skunkworks projects and have seen them work well.
The concept applies everywhere. The most skilled painter of art is probably not the best person to paint your living room.
It’s really really interesting what happens - obviously 5000 doesn’t compare to the behemoth that Microsoft is, but it’s still been interesting to see
It really is a confluence of factors that slows things down and I don’t think it’s as simple as saying business process
Some off the top of my head observations:
You have to try really hard to not settle on hires - the more you grow, the bigger the pile of work and you just want help - to the point where you might hire someone who’s good enough vs holding out for someone exceptional
It’s one thing for 100 people to be throwing money at problems in terms of tooling and outside contractors, once you’re big buying things is way more scrutinized - this is good because you don’t waste money on stupid tools, bad because it slows down buying of non stupid tools that you actually need
Things that didn’t matter before start to matter - security things, legal things, privacy things - these activities take time and also slow things down
Some work just doesn’t scale well - where in the past you could get away with throwing cheap manual labor at the problem, at some point you have to build automation to take care of - this speed things up in the long run, but usually you hit a wall first - as in things get so big they get slow - before you finally build the tools. Knowing which tools are worth building ahead of time is really hard
Related to the above - where in the past it made sense to buy a lot saas apps to run your business, these tend to be expensive so you start building your own
That’s just off the top of my head and nothing scientific. Also, I didn’t mention it specifically but of course you still have your run of the mill bureaucracy that slows things down
Parallel friction: the more peers your work impacts, the more peers their are that can gatekeeper your work, for good and ill.
Grows roughly: log P, where P is impacted peers.
Serial friction: the more significant a change, the more management layers decision making has to pass up through, and every layer already has enough to do without considering significant changes. Can be very hard for a great idea to actually make it to someone who can say "yes", and for them to have the time.
Grows roughly: S^2, IMHO, where S is layers of "too busy" management to be traversed to a potential "yes".
That's the natural default. Some large organizations fight hard to keep the friction down, but it's going to be a fight.
After many years of nimble progress, a company I worked with went through a phase transition, and I spent as many years and more, slowly sinking into quicksand. Before giving up on my own project and moving on.
People should be able to deploy changes without seeking approval/permission from other people/teams as long as they are around to immediately fix something if it breaks
This of course only works provided you’re staying in your lane and only updating systems you own/maintain and systems in close proximity
An acquaintance is an H1B at an Alphabet (owned) corp, hired to work a position that anyone with an Industrial Engineering BS could. And he only found out who owned his employer after an inspection by HQ prior to the scale up for Bard.
I'm happy he got the opportunity, and it enabled his family to marry him and for his new wife to come to the US and start a teaching position at a university, but his role could have been filled by a local grad... if they could have been convinced to accept his salary.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/18/13681738/microsoft-diver...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-microsoft-execs-earn-the...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...
The point is, if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years? I think they mostly got more people and less ability to do anything very well. It hasn't worked out that great for them. Neither of them has much to show for their efforts. Google bootstrapped AI and then had their people walk off to form OpenAI who are (for now) best buddies with MS. Facebook/Meta keeps changing their mind about what they are about. Social media, VR, and now AI. But it seems they end up chasing their tail every time.
MS actually got better over the last ten years. They too had a few nice acquisitions. But more importantly, they revitalized what was a pretty dead development strategy. Github was critical. The attitude towards Linux and the complete 180 on open source in general was critical. MS did quite a few things right under Nadella.
> They don't have any interesting new products.
None of these companies do.
Having the best people and knowing how to use them effectively are two very, very different things
Just my impression; but kind of backed up by what's (not) happening at Google.
MS somehow found a way back from that to where they were doing different enough things to grow their business quite dramatically under Nadella. Google is in need of a similar change.
Edit: Appears my memory is better than I thought[0]
[0] https://westviewnews.org/2019/11/01/bell-labs-second-best-ke...
Google hired the greatest minds to avoid competition that threatened googles monopoly on the search money printer
> if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years?
Sure, these companies have made lots of money, but what have they done?
I actually do believe these companies have "the best people." I'm pretty sure they're just paid a lot less and having a difficult time advancing to staff engineer. Promoting people who are good at politics and being a yesman rather than a "does-good-work-man". For all our leetcoding, our "just make it work" mentality, and "we're going to do 10 interviews and take 3 months so that we can ensure we get the best people" I'm pretty sure we've done a really terrible job at it all. Maybe they are getting the best people, but then just putting them in handcuffs until they give up. Or maybe it's just all politics and no one actually cares about building a god damn product, and no, the stock does not count as a product and it is embarrassing that I even have to clarify this.
[0] While impressive it is still out if this will be profitable and if it'll be positive. It's unclear yet, unlike the other things. Read the rest of what I wrote...
From my experience, that's true for over 90% of the headcount. Everyone talks about quality, about care for customers but rarely that is more than marketing bulshit.
It all reminds me of that scene from Silicon Valley where Barker explains up Richard that when you have the best marketing team you need to give them easier things to sell[0].
> Everyone talks about quality
[0] Sorry, I literally cannot find a better quality video or any other version for that matter... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTbjO3eI_0
I would not say it was 180 turn on open source, more like 160 or 170 ;).
Just enough so they can steer people into using Azure but not so much to still have Visual Studio leads throwing wrenches into open source source wheels to stay relevant.
> if Google and Meta got the best people, what the hell did they do in the last ten years?
Google has a dozen services with > 1 billion users a month. Google in 2010 had only one
So you can have transformers, but the rest all happened much longer ago than 10 years.
Some someone who (still) uses Windows I have to disagree. The gradual enshittification of Windows over the last ten years is infuriating.
1. The best new grads are absolutely not going to Google or Meta. There are many far sexier companies. As a CS grad, landing in big tech is mostly regarded as having settled for mediocrity.
2. Microsoft's compensation for early career is competitive with Google and Meta (at least for the first couple of years; Meta will grow your level faster and Google gives better annual RSU refreshers, but many people don't know this and go by the offer's face value). I don't think there's much of a difference in the talent that they can pick up.
Microsoft also aggressively sops up the best talent in Tier 2 geos -- it's unlikely that the best devs in the Bay Area work at Microsoft but some of the best devs in Vancouver or Atlanta probably work at Microsoft.
I would say though that you’re both correct. Satya came in 2014 and during the last 11 years I would say that the majority of that is as the GP described.
I’m not sure when what you are describing became the outside perspective, but I suspect somewhere around 2019-2022, when Google lost a very large amount of its shine as the former Oracle Execs started to take over fully.
It's not. Microsoft's stock grants are a joke. I left Microsoft after 8 years with ~36k in unvested stock (vesting over 4-5 years) and a title of Senior (L63). Both Google and Meta offered me a downlevel (L4) for a 40% increase in total comp and with annual stock refreshers significantly larger than 5 years worth of stock grants at MSFT.
Microsoft starts to become competitive around Principal/Staff, sort of, but from a compensation perspective working at them at a junior/midlevel/senior level is a huge mistake.
Microsoft already began the process of open sourcing stuff while Ballmer was CEO. Eg. What would become DotNet Core.
There are a number of other errors in your points. Some public, some not. I encourage you to re-examine what you think to be true.
Look, I agree it was time for Ballmer to retire and I’m glad Satya is CEO, but while he made some miscalculations, he wasn’t the zero some try to make him to be.
Microsoft people always liked to tell the story about Ballmer losing his shit with people dealing with him using iPhones. The dude lacked public charisma and his belief in his company played like a NIH syndrome gone wild. But he was hella smart and his push for things like EAs and software assurance paved the way for the modern Microsoft cash cows.
And the Satya revisionist history on his quote is absurd since it’s well documented. He didn’t just say it at a women’s conference. He was asked “For women who aren’t comfortable asking for a raise, what’s your advice for them?”. And part of response included “That might be one of the initial ‘super powers’ that, quite frankly, women don’t ask for a raise have. It’s good karma. It will come back.”
He has since sufficiently walked this back, so it’s odd the need to lie about what he said.
Microsoft under Ballmer completely missed the boat on a bunch of things which should have been pretty close to Microsoft's wheelhouse -- search, social media, mobile/smartphone, and cloud, to name some of the big ones (each one of these spawned a big 10 corporation). It's not that they should be expected to cover all these things or that no other tech company should have become successful, it's just that they had little response to any big developments in the industry for many years.
I think it's less that he wasn't willing to let go of Windows, more that the myopic focus on it blinded them to other issues, or deluded them into believing they could continue using Windows to gatekeep and buy or crush competition. They missed the boat on the internet before Ballmer too, but eventually managed to use the money and power that Windows provided them to grind down the competition.
Cloud is just being the cloud, the AI stuff they are excited on but maybe at the detriment of everything else, Xbox is dying a slow sad death as they are directionless and Windows is just a dump truck for all the more questionable business decisions possible.
The Office suite is one of their key products, and it’s awful.
But, every big company keeps buying this shit.
At least Google feels like a designer looked at it after things have gone live.
And yes, part of that involves the way they’ve changed the hiring and retention objectives.
edit: Not relevant for stack ranking thing but I will highly recommend the book Lights Out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(book)
Compare that to, say, Amazon, where stack-ranking seems to be an unofficial yet actively enforced policy. I've worked and talked with a huge number of ex-Amazon people and each and every one of them had myriad horror stories about the dysfunctional corporate culture. On the other hand, MSFT employees seemed to have much more balanced experiences.
I mean are you saying women are worse leaders? Because it seems to me microsoft is harnessing the limitless potential of gender diversity. With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women
Works both ways btw, if promotion of men is encouraged, you eventually have men of worse leadership qualities than fellow female colleagues promoted over them.
1. there's a significant population of men in tech who make the environment actively hostile for women,
2. women know about this,
3. many women do not want to work in environments actively hostile to them, and
4. women who choose to work at them underperform because dealing with hostility directed at you does take a cognitive toll
(I am only responding to this very weird straw man: "With a gender-diverse staff they will be able to crush their peers by streamlining against horrible things such as toxic masculinity where the bourgeois men keep down honest and hardworking proleteriat women")
edit: lead > led
If I write down the 10-12 best MS people I’ve worked with in those forward facing roles… I’d say 80% of them have been laid off at random or due to internal politics. Standing out there is bad for your health. As a customer, I’m aware of their politics — bad sign.
Also it was towards the end of Ballmer's tenure that the Linux switch happened AFAIK - though Nadella got the credit for it.
Not to be over cynical, I'm happy when big corps give away stuff for free, but has this made them any money?
They seem to have lost all their moats. LibreOffice is on par with MS's offering (which hasn't really done anything interesting in decades). Windows is semi abandoned and bloated adware. The unified OS ecosystem between desktop console and mobile is pretty much dead. The MS "ecosystem" is a half hearted afterthought at this point
Sure, Azure happened to boom in the meantime, but that seems coincidental and not a product of them giving everything away. It's also a lot less of a moat. Cloud is becoming commodity over time.
MS is now Azure with a bunch of atrophying vestigial bits hanging off the side.
How do you know it (that top ppl didnt go there) and why it didn't materialize after a decade?
Sorry but he surely got burned because this completely ignores systemic advantages given to men. If everyone quietly relies on the system then women will be disadvantaged. I know that's not a popular thing to say around here but it's been shown time and again and the women at that conference all knew it too.
> Satya has had to fight against this accusation and he has done so by establishing a quota system for promoting women employees...
That's great and everything but did he actually own the error or recognise the problem with what he said? Volunteer for bias training or anything that would actually help the issue at the core rather than putting bandaids over the wounds?
Satya would kill Windows if he could, and replace everything with Azure OS thin clients.
Likewise XBox woes with console, is due to similar approach, he only cares about XBox as games publisher umbrella brand for all Microsoft Games Studios subdivisions.
Android and iOS/macOS are what Longhorn never managed to be (granted still under Balmer), and SwiftUI/Jetpack Compose have managed to be something useful in half the time Project Reunion has been going with a joke in resourcing.
same guy also says
> Microsoft today is the second most valuable company
go figure
Such terrible loss for the company, that deserves no better due its handling of them, with as usual a complete lack of oversight of its middle managers.
But Microsoft was never known for carefully curation of talent or breaking technologies, from its roots it was a , take what it can, hold on it, sue the rest. From the earliest days of DOS to the later years of ignoring the iphone, to the careful privacy invading code even from the 90s.
I am greatful for all they have done, and some thin skinned managers may read this and be upset, but this is just feedback, which can help improve the company.
"a lot of women now occupy positions they would not otherwise. Again, the impact is decreased ability to execute."
Meanwhile you have Satya Nadella. This very sanitized, boring, fake, borderline manufactured personality. I can't imagine sitting through a 3hr interview/podcast with him as a guest. I had no problem listening to this one though.
That said, I'm not sure we'd see a dramatically more forthright and unfiltered Satya when he's ten years out of MSFT. I think much of Satya's style is simply the way he is all the time.
Matter of fact, I'd even argue that being #1 spokesperson and giving this low energy vibe is kind of bad for how the company is seen by the public. I'd rather have the "developers developers developers" CEO over whatever Satya is.
I was fairly impressed with Satya in his first few years as CEO, mostly due to his embracing hard but necessary strategic changes that had been put off too long. However, the last few years I feel like he's really stalled out. To be clear, I'm not assessing based on the current revenue or stock price which can lag by five or more years but on doing the right things strategically, technically and on product vision. It's unclear the mind-boggling mountains of cash poured on AI (mostly OpenAI) in order to play catch-up are going to pay off in sufficiently high-margin revenue in a Wall Street-relevant time frame.
And big chunks of the mountains of cash dumped into rolling up large gaming franchises at peak post-Covid game bubble valuations are already being written off.
I'm told that when I give talks it sounds like a lecture from a college professor. That's ... probably a compliment, because I thought my public speaking skills were even worse than that.
Point is, I think part of the explanation is Satya coming from a technical background and still being uncomfortable and coming across as slightly forced as a result. Ballmer was a marketer first, an extroverted businessman, and quite comfortable on stage.
Elon has had good success with this brash behaviour while the others like Satya, Zucc and Sundar have taken the other route.
I never realized how much of azure was him early on.' I didn't realize the tension between him and Bill, always assumed those two were thick as thieves, all the time. I super respect him for stepping down so that the company can change in the way it needs to, and also so wall street would realize a change has happened (which was around spending discipline vs. investments, and giving forward guidance, etc)
I left this episode with a lot more respect for him as a person and saw him much more introspective and up front that I would have imagined based on what I thought I knew before.
Also, a formerly favorite phrase of saying "we're in the Ballmer era at X company" is struck from my vocabularly, since in most places I've used it, it's meant to be an insult to the company, however it's really just an insult to Ballmer. He was way more intuned than many others.
But I remember their entire Microsoft episodes felt like a lengthy defense of Steve Ballmer. There were too many instances of “here’s why this bad decision of Steve made sense given the circumstances” or “ here is how people underestimate the contribution of Steve on this good decision.” They were all well argued points, of course, but so numerous that I found myself wondering if the hosts does not have a relationship with Steve.
The existence of this interview does not help with that suspicion.
The old three envelope joke.
You become CEO and there are three envelopes on your office desk, a note says "Every time there is an issue you open them in order and do what is inside". First envelope says "Blame your predecessor.". The second says "Blame yourself". The third says "Prepare three envelopes".
The second step in this joke is something like "Reorganize.", not "Blame yourself".
I think Ballmer was better than how he was perceived. So I did expect some justification, etc in their MS episodes. But these points seemed, to use your word, numerous. I think they must have done this because in preparation for those MS episodes, they did talk to Ballmer, and expected him to listen to the episodes. Comparatively their Bernard Arnault, LVMH games take on episodes like LVMH, Hermes seemed somewhat balanced.
But allowing a single person to go from $20B to $130B in assets in 10 years feels like a pretty obvious policy failure.
This is not to say it's his fault. That's how our laws are written. But that is the point of OP. That our policies should be forcing him to sell and put that money back into the economy.
The only time money actually flows to the company is when stock is initially offered.
A company might be valued billions in the stock market, but this is not money that the company can work with.
> A company might be valued billions in the stock market, but this is not money that the company can work with.
Both of these statements are demonstrably false. Why do you think companies go public (which is quite troublesome) in the first place? Just vanity to see the billions they don't have access to? Or to allow investors to make money without helping the company in any way? It's clear why investors would come to a purely speculative market with no intrinsic value (e.g. crypto) but it's unclear why a company would offer their shares to be traded like a shitcoin.
Being public is the instrument for the company first and foremost. There's the IPO, then companies continuously issue and buyback stocks depending on the cashflow. Look e.g. at the graph of Tesla's outstanding shares [1]. Then companies also sell bonds or borrow money using their own stock as the collateral. The bigger valuation you have the more capital you have access to.
Not to mention that even in the OP's simplistic view of the market there is an actual "new value" aspect: if you buy stocks from a VC or a founder, they use it to fund the next startup.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/shares-...
Fair point about using stock as collateral though.
It wouldn't be called "Initial Public Offering" if it was the "Only Public Offering" like you suggest.
When I say initial offering, I mean whenever stock is newly (initially) issued - whether that's in IPO, after an IPO or also in a private offering. Not sure what the correct term would be.
My point was, money essentially only flows into the company at that point. E.g. company issues stock, investor A buys it.
When investor A sells to investor B, money only flows between these two investors. No money flows to the company.
Unless - as you have pointed out - company assumes the role of an investor in its own stock.
But the fact alone that a stock price is rising as such does not generate any new capital to work with for the company. And that is a point many people seem to misunderstand.
When Microsoft is worth 3.76 trillion USD, that doesn't mean that Microsoft has 3.76 trillion USD it can work with. That was the point I was trying to make.
The above is a mere byproduct of the market working. The market "works" by giving companies and entrepreneurs access to capital, the rest is a derivative of that. Otherwise you can as well trade postal stamps rather than stocks.
Either way the economy is not zero sum game where there's a fixed amount of money. If the stock market grows there is more money. That money reflects future expectations discounted to today but it's still more money.
On the original question, how does Ballmer being very wealthy impacts the rest of us, there is no easy answer. It depends on what he does with his money. It can be neutral, positive, or negative. The sentiment though seems to be mostly driven by jealousy and a sense of unfairness. It's in fashion these days (in some circles) to hate the "rich" (which is basically anyone better off than yourself more or less).
It would be at least as accurate to say it's as close as money can get to not existing at all. Policy should probably not be "forcing" people to realize gains that, in many cases (maybe not MS, but policy has to work for everyone), may as well be Monopoly money.
send me your numbers then edgelord... o wait theyre not just numbers now that Ive asked for some. Go read up on futures markets - they were invented to service a legitimate, real world problem - yes deriviative markets of today have become abstract but its no as black and white as capitalists vs us.
Realistically large companies don't do this. They put their money in hedge funds, which are much less risk averse, which would assume that they are more actively putting the money into the economy.
Concentrated wealth doesn’t circulate well, which leads to inflation.
I thought we all had some economic chops on this forum?
I was excited by all new green energy startups due to Biden Admin's policies (BIL, IRA, etc). Oh well...
I know you know all this; I'm just compelled to repeatedly point out the obvious.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
Pretty ironic that you'd call out economic chops when this is a very basic and well understood principle. Perhaps be more cautious and less confident in your presuppositions going forward.
The fact that you’re the only one to point it out makes me think that I have put too much faith here.
It’s patently obvious that less circulation is a depressive force on economic activity.
A system that allows this kind of extreme wealth accumulation is quite fundamentally at odds with democracy because extreme wealth can be and is in practice used to influence politics in a way that undermines democracy.
Some people might not care about that, but if your goal is improving the outcomes of the largest number of people, then pretty much everything else is secondary to having a functioning democracy.
1. The amount wealth actually influences politics is hard to measure but likely much lower than most people assume. Trump was outspent significantly both times he won. Bloomberg dropped $1B in a couple months and won nowhere but American Somoa. Probably the two biggest boogiemen, Koch and Soros, have spent billions over the years on their causes, and the present administration and general overton window is actually something neither of them like! The nonelected king-makers in American and EU politics are not actually wealthy people at all, just those with a lot of accumulated political capital, for instance, Jim Clyburn who single-handedly gave the 2020 nomination to Biden.
2. The amount that it takes to finance initiatives is much lower than centibillionaire level. Is the original $20B OP mentioned not sufficient to finance some ballot initiative? Why is it the increase to $130B that causes concern? The truth is that even a wealthy non-billionaire can easily do that, or bankroll someone's run for congress, or fund a partisan thinktank. The maximum level of wealth you'd have to set your ban-limit at would be problematically low.
The whole point of capitalism is to put chunks of economy under control of capable people. If they managed to get rich then on average they're much better at that than the general population.
This is not an unpleasant side-effect, this is the main reason the whole system exists, remove it and it's not capitalism anymore.
What does this even mean? Pension funds have a lot of board seats? I only see one person from Blackrock on their board right now.
Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?
The Board members are appointed by the Intel Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee, the chair of the committee is Barbara G. Novick, co-founder of BlackRock. The board is de-facto run by the trio of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, smaller investors follow their lead.
> Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?
Alignment of interest is not magical: it's necessary to achieve results but it isn't sufficient. You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest.
Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs". In the end they are roughly as good at running things as are socialist states: economy is owned by everyone so no one in particular, run by people who never proved that can run a lemonade stand. In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
Thanks I learned something new today. Is Intel unique or is it common? Does Novick have this position due to pension funds specifically, or index funds in general? AIUI index funds own large stakes in many public companies so if this is true, they are all effectively run by Blackrock and Vanguard (or should be).
> You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest. Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs".
As opposed to other investors? Outside of founder-owners you've described 99% of retail and institutional investors. Why do you believe pension funds specifically lack "talent"? As long as there is competitive pressure in every market, it doesn't matter. Some of them will be right and actually deliver better products, services, and profits.
> In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.
I've long believed that's the only way to make the welfare state numbers (in any country) work in the long run. Not the whole economy but like substantial proportions of the stock market. You can't tax labor to fund retirees when capital captures most of the returns and there are fewer and fewer workers. And you can't renege on promises already made to people who have been contributing throughout their careers. This can work: sovereign wealth funds are an example. Rising productivity is an updraft that pension funds should capture.
I'm not a market guru, just happen to know about Intel because I worked there between 2009 and 2015 and it was sad for me personally to witness the downfall. The company started to rot around 2012, but the stock prices shot up and kept rising for 8 years. The strategy was "higher CPU price, less R&D, less people budget, no risky bets like mobile", this drove the earnings up to the pleasure of shareholders. You can't even call this strategy "shortsighted", it's "medium-sighted" because of the huge momentum that took years to dissipate, but the company's fate was sealed then. I don't know details of what happened to Boeing but suspect it was something similar.
> AIUI index funds own large stakes in many public companies so if this is true, they are all effectively run by Blackrock and Vanguard (or should be).
They almost never have the majority so control is determined by the presence of other figures which smaller investors could follow during the vote. A founder even with a partial control is often enough to steer it. When there's no one left but the funds they run the show.
> As opposed to other investors? Outside of founder-owners you've described 99% of retail and institutional investors.
Well first of all in this thread we are discussing precisely the question of how to redistribute the shares of the founder. OP says that the "policy" should have taken them away. "And who to give them?" I ask.
Second, I don't think 99% of investors (measured by volume of investment) have no strategy.
> Why do you believe pension funds specifically lack "talent"?
Because they're not backed by anyone in particular. Talent is always risky, systems that try to please millions of stakeholders are inherently risk-averse.
> I've long believed that's the only way to make the welfare state numbers (in any country) work in the long run.
I do realize many people think like that and that's why it's so scary for me. I don't believe this system could work.
thats some rot! they should teach other ceos how to ruin a company into the number one spot lol
Who do you think generated that excess 110 billion? Ballmer's advanced managerial capabilities? Sure "the market" might have valued equity more, but that's still the policy failure. Saying that "this is how this works" is silly. It could just as well work some other way.
The only way for your "policy" to "prevent" is to redistribute the control to someone else, usually bureaucrats. And I, again, strongly believe that it's better for businesses to be controlled by entrepreneurs and not by bureaucrats.
And when they issue more, then this initial offering again (of new stock).
The interesting thing to me isn't this community specifically, it's that all the prosperity that we (here anyways, for the most part) are enjoying, all the technological achievements, the lifting of billions of people from poverty ( https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief ), elimination of many diseases, increased lifespan, were mostly achieved under some version of capitalism.
It's not that there aren't problems (lots) and it's not that the widening gap between the very rich and everyone else isn't a concern but the simple narratives are also wrong.
If people can't profit off of things they won't innovate, and even if they did there is no market if people can't profit off it.
patently absurd. no inventions before capitalism?
The value of Microsoft exploded. It seems to me that someone's compensation being directly linked to the value they helped create is exactly how you want people compensated.
Figures. It was a highly profitable division that nobody could figure out what it did or how.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/07/hear-how-steve-ballme...
It was text only, no mouse or GUI, and used some weird automatic mode switching UI that Raskin tinkered with for decades after but never really went anywhere.
But he was also enthusiastic about weird non-tech marketing initiatives like trying to partner with big paper companies to launch “MS Office” branded paper for higher margin paper sales. I think this was a few years before the US version of The Office. But it sounds pretty Dunder-Mifflin to me! Whatever his flaws, I don’t see Satya going in this direction.
Source: I spoke directly with someone who worked with Ballmer on this.
And he's in the news for it because the team might have used a sketchy tactic with a fake endorsement company to lure the player in. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595033/2025/09/03/kawhi-le...
Same ol' Balmer. haha
You know that "used car salesman" persona that he had in that internal Windows 1.0 video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJS2tQPGKQ)? That's kind of his business strategy -- sell, sell, sell, push, push, push. Don't let potential clients say "no" to Microsoft products. And when you're an aggressive company like Microsoft, you want that in an exec -- but not necessarily a CEO who's in charge of managing the technical developments also. So I think he was really competent and essential to Microsoft's success, even if he didn't make such a good CEO.
(Fun fact: I used to think that the character Palmer from Final Fantasy VII, a member of Shinra Company's executive leadership, was a parody of Steve Ballmer himself based on his name, appearance, and goofy mannerisms. I'm no longer convinced this is the case, but it's a pretty funny coincidence.)
> Why would I sell, so we have less to give to philanthropy someday, unless I really think Microsoft’s going to underperform the market by essentially the capital gains rate.
Haha, yeah, I think you've forgotten the last third there Steve.
Ballmer sort of acknowledged Ray's role when he said that Cutler would not have wanted to work in the Servers and Tools org. But I think Ballmer undersells how much of the Azure strategy actually came from Ray.
guess end of day - money is a scale not an item to be measured.
It worked, too. Every enterprise shop in the mid-late 90s was all in on Windows NT and ActiveX, until Java could get enough of a toehold in the enterprise space.
Microsoft gets a lot of hate for being anti-open source, but they really did treat developers very well -- as long as you stayed within their ecosystem.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...