Steve Ballmer on becoming one of the world's richest billionaires | 60 minutes

Former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, Steve Ballmer, has always been one of the richest billionaires in the world.

Despite his vast fortune, friends say Ballmer is still the type to complain about the cost of a hotel minibar. The billionaire has no superyacht, no fancy wardrobe and still lives in the four-bedroom house where he and his wife raised their three sons. Still, there's no doubt that Ballmer's net worth of more than $120 billion made an impact.

“I have fundamentally changed. I know it’s me,” Ballmer said.

Ballmer's beginnings

Growing up in a Detroit suburb, Ballmer was a shy, timid boy. His father, a Swiss immigrant, had a middle-level job at Ford. Ballmer went to Harvard, where he managed the football team and formed a close friendship with another Harvard student: Bill Gates.

Gates dropped out of college to start a software company, while Ballmer went in a different direction: sales and marketing at Procter & Gamble, where he made Duncan Hines brownie mix, blueberry muffin mix and Moist 'n' Easy snack cake mix sold. But baked goods, he discovered, weren't his calling, so Ballmer attended Stanford Business School. He was in the middle of his first year when he received a call from Gates, who wanted to recruit Ballmer to his chaotic software startup.

“But software for microcomputers didn’t exist back then in any way, shape or form,” Ballmer said.

Nevertheless, Gates convinced and Ballmer left the school to join his friend.

Ballmer's salary? $40,000 plus 9% ownership in Gates' company.

Ballmer's legacy at Microsoft

Together, Gates and Ballmer embodied Microsoft. Enthusiasm became Ballmer's trademark and a meme went viral after a video of a sweaty Ballmer chanting “developer, developer, developer” went viral.

“This is a guy who really wanted to cheer people on. He wanted to say, 'Hey, we love you. We want you to write software for Windows,'” Ballmer said.

Looking back, Ballmer admits he's a little embarrassed.

But “I personally feed off energy,” he said. “And by the way, it’s not for everyone. I mean, you know, some people are calmer. But it’s me.”

Ballmer took over as Microsoft CEO in 2000 and his tenure was marked by wins and losses. It is known that he did not take the challenge of Apple's iPhone seriously when it was launched and laughed at the idea in 2007.

“My goodness. You know, the phone. Man, the phone. We should have been on the phone. We should have been the leaders,” he said.

And yet, Microsoft's revenue more than tripled during Ballmer's tenure as CEO. He retained most of his shares and saw his personal wealth skyrocket.

From computers to basketball

Ballmer left Microsoft In 2014, the same year, he bought the LA Clippers. People have asked if he always wanted to own a basketball team.

“Of course not,” said Ballmer. “Who the hell ever thinks you’re going to get paid enough to own a basketball team?”

It's different than running Microsoft, a company with revenues 20 times that of the NBA. But Ballmer says he enjoys this job more, partly because performance is much easier to measure.

“People ask me, 'What's the difference between business and basketball?' – Well, if you have a bad quarter, you can say, 'Next time I'll get him' or 'You don't know what's going on.' “But it’s going to be great,” Ballmer said. “Here you get a scorecard every 24 seconds. 'Did we score? Did we stop them from scoring?' Every 24 seconds, if you lose it, you can never change it.