Steve Ballmer Chases NBA Glory at Intuit Dome, the LA Clippers’ Gleaming New Home

“Ah, shit,” says Steve Ballmer. “We wound up having to go with the metal here, didn’t we?” The multibillionaire is inspecting every crevice of Intuit Dome, the future home of his beloved Los Angeles Clippers and, in his estimation, a “basketball mecca.”

Donning a hard hat and safety vest, Ballmer takes me on a tour he’s given to the likes of Disney boss Bob Iger, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z. “When we’re walking through the building together,” Ballmer says of the iconic rapper, “nobody notices me.” Perhaps, but when I walk through the sprawling project with Ballmer, none of his desires goes unnoticed. Like with Ballmer’s frustration over a metal divider; lead designer Bill Hanway reassures him there will be a transparent glass one, just as requested, when the new NBA season tips off this fall.

But that’s still months out on this April afternoon as the Clippers owner trudges through an obstacle course of cable drums and stacks of wood, where roughly 1,100 workers are conducting a score of beeps and grinding metal. Ballmer, though, is already in launch mode, surveying the dust-filled rooms with the same meticulous energy he once brought to Microsoft. “This and the team, that’s our product,” he tells me. “This is what you experience as a customer.”

In another life, that product might have been Windows 95. Or the Xbox. Ballmer’s legacy is inextricably tied to Microsoft, where he joined his old Harvard pal Bill Gates as the company’s 30th employee and would eventually spend more than a decade at the helm. “We basically helped democratize computing,” he notes. Ballmer remains Microsoft’s largest individual shareholder, adding billions to his personal wealth amid the company’s artificial-intelligence boom, and still keeps a hand in the tech world, whether that’s talking shop with OpenAI chief Sam Altman or popping up on CNBC to weigh in on his longtime rival, Apple, making its own AI splash.

But Ballmer’s most pressing task these days is overseeing the completion of his stately pleasure dome in Inglewood and constructing a championship-caliber club to play in it. It’s a tall order, as the Clippers have never won a title in their half-century-plus existence. Despite emerging as a recurring playoff contender, they have yet to shake their rep as the little brother to the city’s most celebrated team. “It’s hard enough getting out of the Lakers’ shadow,” he admits. “We’re trying to establish an identity.”

Ballmer wants a more intimate environment than what’s offered at the cavernous Crypto.com Arena—formerly Staples Center—which the Clippers have shared with the Lakers for 25 years. He urged his crew to limit gaps created by passages exiting the arena and luxury boxes. “I hate suites,” Ballmer says, “to the degree that they break up the bowl.” And in an effort to keep fans glued to the action, he eschewed the sprawling social spaces that are in vogue at stadiums across the major professional leagues. “Even though,” he notes, “they tell me that’s what millennials like.”

The team has drawn inspiration from venues across the NBA and other sports. The Wall, a 51-row, 4,500-seat section behind one of the baskets, was inspired by Viejas Arena, home of San Diego State University’s basketball teams, where Ballmer attended the jersey retirement ceremony for Clippers star Kawhi Leonard. Reminiscent of the towering stands at European soccer stadiums, the Wall will be reserved for Clippers diehards; any cheering for the visiting team or displays of opposing apparel will get you the boot. Meanwhile, the team’s lockers were modeled after those used at Wimbledon, and the LED halo board above the court will rival those used by NFL teams like the Los Angeles Rams and Atlanta Falcons.

“That’s a hellaciously expensive scoreboard,” says Ballmer, gazing upward.

I ask how much it cost, prompting Ballmer to turn toward Hanway.

“Can I say ‘ish’?” Ballmer asks. “A hundred million–ish?”

“A little bit less than that,” Hanway says.

Ballmer settles for an estimate of “80 to 100,” an unfathomable amount to pretty much everyone but him. On the day we meet, per Forbes’s “real-time” billionaires index, Ballmer’s net worth will swell by $1.8 billion to more than $125 billion.

The tour wraps in one of Intuit Dome’s luxury suites, where the view of the halo board is obscured by an overhang. Ballmer explains that the suites located in the corner of the arena didn’t come out exactly as they were modeled, and now he will have to figure out how to make the best of what he’s got. “We can’t change the physics,” says Ballmer. “It’s just something we’re going to have to think about as we sell to make sure people know exactly what they got.”

Ballmer, who turned 68 in March, isn’t quite as spry as he was in the Microsoft days, when he would bounce around onstage at company events, shrieking and flailing his arms like someone having a religious experience. (If you haven’t seen the videos, go to YouTube.) But the eccentricities are still there, the volume still high, his kinetic energy at full tilt—never more so than at Clippers games, where he can be found hurtling through the full spectrum of human emotion. He is, to use an enduring Ballmerism, hard-core.

“I keep thinking of a word around Steve,” says NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. “Loud.”

I saw it for myself the night before my tour of Intuit Dome, when I took in a game between the Clippers and the Denver Nuggets. Seated next to Chaz Fitzhugh, a friend since his freshman year at Harvard, Ballmer rocked and lurched in his seat, living and dying with every possession. The Clippers nursed a 2-point lead late in the fourth when all-star Paul George stepped to the line for a pair of free throws, but Ballmer couldn’t bear to watch, shielding his eyes with his left hand. Fitzhugh, like someone who had been there before, dutifully tapped Ballmer’s knee after George calmly buried both shots. (“The Steve you see courtside is the Steve I saw that first week,” Fitzhugh tells me.)

Nikola Jokić, Denver’s three-time MVP, tortured the Clippers (and Ballmer) all night, posting one of his casually awesome triple-doubles. But Jokić’s potential game winner fell short, and the Clippers escaped with a 2-point win. Ballmer rose from his seat triumphantly, alternating punches in a way that made it look like he was swimming through air, stomping his feet on the hardwood floor, exchanging high fives with Fitzhugh and anyone else in his vicinity. It was, in other words, just another day at the office.

Ballmer is avuncular and affable, his voice detouring into an affect at any moment, the decibel level typically rising with it. “I keep thinking of a word around Steve,” says Silver, the NBA commissioner. “Loud.” Ballmer also likes to clap, sometimes to signal his approval, other times when he thinks something is funny––or maybe simply because he needs the tactile and auditory fix that only a clap can provide.

At Microsoft, Mich Mathews-Spradlin kept a basketball in her office, which came in handy when Ballmer visited. “It was good because he had something to do with his hands and he could pace with it,” recalls Mathews-Spradlin, who served as chief marketing officer before leaving the company in 2011. Mark Lucovsky, a key engineer at Microsoft who was part of the team that designed Windows NT, has similar memories of Ballmer parading around the offices with a baseball bat or tennis racket, a contrast in style to the often-aloof Gates. “He’s got a lot of energy,” Lucovsky says of Ballmer, “and he’s constantly using it up.”

Still, Ballmer’s most peculiar trait might be his ordinariness, a no-frills nature more befitting a regional manager than a billionaire executive. Friends and associates marvel at how a guy whose net worth is larger than the GDP of most countries can be so, well, normal. When Hanway first met him, Ballmer showed up solo to his office in his suburban-dad uniform of khakis and a button-down, with a backpack strapped over his shoulders. Surprised by the lack of an entourage, Hanway wondered if Ballmer was waiting for anyone else. “He’s like, ‘Who were you expecting?’” Hanway recalled.

A few years back Clippers coach Tyronn Lue was surprised by Ballmer’s willingness to make an offseason visit to Lue’s hometown of Mexico, Missouri. “I had just been thinking of ways to help my community out, and I was talking to Mr. Ballmer about different ways of making that happen,” Lue says. “When the season was over, he was like, ‘Hey, when are we going to Mexico, Missouri?’ I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’” The two took Ballmer’s private jet to Jefferson City before driving about an hour to Mexico, where they stayed at a Best Western. “He woke up the next day and said, ‘That’s some of the best rest I’ve had in a long time,’” Lue says. “That’s just who he is.”

Ballmer’s casual presentation belies an intensity and intelligence that are both more than a little intimidating. Within the hard-driving culture of Microsoft, employees were expected to match Ballmer’s energy––or at least try to keep up. “He was an incredibly demanding guy,” Mathews-Spradlin says. Lucovsky caught a glimpse of Ballmer’s temper after revealing that he was leaving Microsoft for Google in 2004. According to Lucovsky, Ballmer came unglued, calling Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy” and throwing a chair in a fit of rage. There is some dispute over the incident, with Ballmer insisting he “shook” but did not throw the chair. Either way, Lucovsky is over it. “No hard feelings,” he says.

While Ballmer could be an imposing figure at Microsoft, within the Clippers organization he is spoken of with extreme reverence––and, at times, in a way that verges on paternalistic. “You have no excuses because he provides you with all the resources to be successful. I think all of us feel a great indebtedness to deliver for him,” says Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball operations. “None of us want to let Steve down.”

Had it not been for a messy scandal a decade back, Ballmer might be still at home in Washington State, pining for an NBA franchise. In 2013, while still CEO of Microsoft, Ballmer and hedge fund manager Chris Hansen led a group that tried to buy the Sacramento Kings with the intention of relocating the team to Seattle. Despite reaching an agreement with the Kings’ owners, Ballmer and Hansen saw their proposal rejected by the NBA’s board of governors. The following year Ballmer looked into buying the Milwaukee Bucks, but the team’s owner at the time, the late senator Herb Kohl, was wary of Ballmer’s moving them to the Pacific Northwest and turned to other bidders.

Barely a week after Kohl sold the Bucks for $550 million, Clippers then owner Donald Sterling was caught on a recording making a series of racist comments. The NBA promptly hit Sterling with a lifetime ban, forcing a sale. Ballmer won the ensuing Clippers sweepstakes for $2 billion, outbidding a group featuring David Geffen, Oprah Winfrey, Larry Ellison, and Jimmy Iovine. The saga got the small-screen treatment this past June in FX’s Clipped, starring Ed O’Neill as Sterling, Laurence Fishburne as then coach Doc Rivers, and James Shanklin as Ballmer.

With the Clippers Ballmer has been more than willing to flex his financial muscles, deploying his unmatched funds to eliminate a legal hurdle that threatened to prevent Intuit Dome from being built. New York Knicks owner James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden Company filed a lawsuit to block the construction of the arena, alleging that the city and its mayor violated their contract with the Forum, the former home of the Lakers that MSG bought in 2012, when they entered negotiations with Ballmer. The suit turned the city’s 2018 mayoral race into a high-priced proxy fight, with Ballmer donating more than $350,000 to a committee supporting the incumbent, James T. Butts, and Dolan’s MSG pouring in nearly $1 million in support of the challenger, Marc Little. (“In the mayor’s election in Inglewood, the most you normally spend is a quarter of a million,” says Butts, who was reelected in a landslide.) But litigation persisted, and after years of legal wrangling, Ballmer decided that the best solution was simply to buy the Forum for $400 million in cash, settling the dispute with MSG in the process.

Ballmer has been the anti-Sterling, whose miserly ownership bordered on parody. (Sterling is reportedly said to have once asked if the team could do without a trainer.) The team qualified for the playoffs just seven times in Sterling’s 33 years of ownership, and in 2000 Sports Illustrated ran a cover story declaring the Clippers “the Worst Franchise in Sports History.” On Ballmer’s watch, the Clippers have doled out big contracts and mortgaged future assets to construct an immediate contender. In 2019, the Clippers signed Leonard, a coup made all the more significant by the fact that he chose them over the Lakers. The next day the Clippers acquired George in a blockbuster trade to create a formidable one-two punch with Leonard. Last year the team took another swing, trading for former MVP James Harden. “We want to win every year,” Ballmer says. “It is a philosophy.”

Fitzhugh says Ballmer wants “the Larry”––as in the Larry O’Brien Trophy, awarded annually to the NBA champions––more than just about anything. “He really wants it bad,” Fitzhugh adds. “Hey, we’re not spring chickens. So we’d like to do it before they have to wheel us in here.”

Not every team owner is wired to win like that. Between media deals and sponsorship pacts, sports franchises can be lucrative businesses regardless of on-court performance. But Ballmer, perhaps content with his mountains of money, is clearly in it for a ring. Clippers players have taken notice. George, who now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers, says Ballmer’s “passion is unmatched when you compare him to other owners.”

“I know how competitive I am,” says Chris Paul, the future Hall of Famer who played for the Clippers from 2011 to 2017, “and you can’t show me too many people who are more competitive than Steve.”

The players bear witness to Ballmer’s intensity, as he attended all but three of the Clippers’ 41 home games last season, along with a smattering of the team’s road games. Ballmer does not own a residence in Los Angeles but has been a courtside fixture since buying the team. For most games he flies in and out on the same day, returning to his home in Bellevue, Washington, where he and his wife, Connie, raised their three sons, Sam, Peter, and Aaron. “My wife is a northwesterner, through and through,” he says of not owning a place in Los Angeles. “She loves it up here. She loves the climate. Her friends are all up here. Our first grandchild is up here, so no, we’re never going to move. I can get down to LA when I want to.”

Under Ballmer the Clippers have missed the playoffs just twice in 10 years, but the Larry has been painfully elusive. After trading for Harden last season, the Clippers flashed title credentials by rattling off 17 wins out of 20 from December to January, but the team dipped after the all-star break and Leonard—whose tenure has been marred by injuries––was sidelined by the end of the season with inflammation in his right knee. He played in just two games in the opening round of the playoffs as the Clippers fell in May to the Dallas Mavericks.

The Clippers now head to Intuit Dome with a suddenly unpromising outlook. Leonard and Harden both re-signed with the team this year, but George left in the summer to join Philadelphia, representing a major blow to Ballmer’s all-in approach. A far cry from the contender that was constructed five years ago, the current version of the Clippers stands well below the NBA’s elite, seemingly miles from challenging for the Larry. Ballmer has little choice but to stay the course, however. The trade for George left the Clippers bereft of future draft picks, which means the team cannot easily pivot to a rebuild––not that Ballmer has any interest in that. “We are not going to have the number one pick in the NBA draft anytime soon, so we better stay in,” he says. “We can’t say, Hey, let’s back up, get the second, third pick and rebuild around that. It’s not going to happen. We’re in LA, so it shouldn’t happen. And I don’t want it to happen.”

A month after the team’s playoff exit came another loss in the Clippers family, as Hall of Famer Jerry West, who had been working as a consultant for the team, died at age 86. “He’s like my basketball dad,” Ballmer tells me. “He’s just sage. You learn from him. But the most thing I’ll miss is the fun I have working with Jerry. I’ll miss what he can do for our team.”

After the tour of Intuit Dome, I meet Ballmer at the venue the Clippers are leaving behind, in a room that has become known as his bunker. Since the arena opened as Staples Center in 1999, the Clippers operated as the third tenant, below the Los Angeles Kings and the Lakers in the pecking order. The arrangement left the Clippers with a smaller cut of revenue from the luxury suites and saddled the team with the least coveted tip-off times.

“He had the experience of his team playing in someone else’s arena and quickly realized everything that he imagined for the experience of owning a basketball franchise—and all the things he wanted for the Clippers—were unlikely to ever be achieved if we didn’t have our own home,” says Gillian Zucker, the team’s president of business operations. Silver notes that “Steve came in with a vision” for Intuit Dome of “not just about building the best arena aesthetically, but how can I create an even better sixth-man advantage.”

Ballmer used to hang out in the office of former Kings general manager Dean Lombardi before games and at halftime before Zucker discovered an available space near the locker rooms. Enter the bunker, a corporate-style conference room stocked with Ballmer’s favorite snacks (an assortment of nuts, berries, and popcorn). We take our seats at the end of a long table, facing a bank of TVs mounted on the wall, all of which are showing NBA games.

In some respects Ballmer can seem like an open book. But he is reluctant to talk about politics. He tells me he keeps his “strong opinions” to himself in deference to his work on USAFacts, a website he launched in 2017 that synthesizes government data into charts and reports on a host of policy issues.

“Do I think this is a crazy year? Yes. Would I like to see some younger candidates? Yes. Do I have a preferred candidate? Yes,” he says. “Am I going to talk about that? No. Am I going to let that get in the way of the nonpartisan approach of USAFacts? No.”

While Ballmer has backed various candidates and groups over the years, there are fewer donations in his name than from Connie. Virtually all the recipients of the Ballmers’ giving have been Democrats and progressive causes. In 2022 they donated $250,000 each in support of the successfully passed Proposition 1, which enshrined a constitutional guarantee to abortion and contraceptives in California. Their philanthropic company, the Ballmer Group, has issued grants aimed at systemic racism in housing, criminal justice reform, and climate change, among other areas of focus.

“Does my wife have strong views that she will express publicly that I won’t? Absolutely,” he says. “You can check out where she’s made her donations. I don’t think you’ll find a Republican in the group.” (Connie Ballmer has donated to a few Republicans, but not many. Through a representative, she declined an interview request.) Ballmer credits Connie with helping to steer him into philanthropy after he retired from Microsoft, as she had already been working on child-welfare issues. The Ballmer Group focuses on economic mobility, particularly in the Black community. “There’s a real issue in this country for kids who are born into circumstances [and] probably can’t even dream realistically of a step up economically from the situation of their birth,” he says. “To us that just doesn’t feel fair.”

Ballmer tweets little, he says, because he doubts people are interested in his nonpartisan takes or anodyne thoughts on the Clippers’ performances. He’s only met Twitter-cum-X owner Elon Musk briefly, though he admires Musk as an innovator. “He’s made key industries happen, and I respect the hell out of that,” says Ballmer. “Some of his ramblings on X, I dunno…. Some I don’t buy into, some I do kind of buy into. Some of it is hard just to understand.”

He has spent a bit more time with Altman, whose OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft. “He’s a curious guy,” says Ballmer. Over lunch Altman had questions about sales, Ballmer recalls. “I wanted to know where he thought he was taking the company. He’s an impressive guy.” The partnership with OpenAI has been a boon for Ballmer’s old company, which has returned to the highest rung of the tech-industry food chain. In an issue earlier this summer, Fortune declared that “Microsoft is back on top”—a reminder that for a while it wasn’t.

Ballmer’s tenure as Microsoft CEO, a job he took in 2000 after Gates shifted to the role of chief technology officer, garnered mixed reviews. (“Microsoft’s Lost Decade” was the headline of a 2012 Vanity Fair article in which insiders pointed the finger at Ballmer.) The company’s revenue and profit both soared under his watch, but its stock price was stagnant, as Microsoft got lapped by rivals in emerging sectors such as mobile and search. In one of his more infamous moments as CEO, he laughed off the commercial viability of a newly released product called the iPhone, dismissing it as too expensive. He now admits that those remarks will be etched on his “tech tombstone.”

“There are things I missed, sure. Between Bill and I, we didn’t get serious enough about phones in the right way. That’s the one I’d say [we missed]. You could say search, but it was kind of more outside our wheelhouse. The notion of a device—more inside of our wheelhouse,” Ballmer says. “That was certainly a miss.”

Gates and the late Paul Allen—who owned the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks—are officially recognized as the company’s founders. But there is no question that Ballmer, who joined in 1980, played a central role in turning the company into a powerhouse. “Bill founded Microsoft,” he says. “I feel like founder number two.” Ballmer helped orchestrate a deal that put the Windows operating system on IBM computers, a seminal event in Microsoft’s evolution, and he professionalized the company with a staff shakeup upon his arrival. “I didn’t like the staff we had,” he says. “We cleaned out. We added people. Tuning the culture, tuning the people.”

“They’re two extremely different people,” a former Microsoft engineer says of Ballmer and Bill Gates. “They worked together at Microsoft because they needed each other. They don’t need each other anymore.”

Microsoft’s stock has recently surged under Ballmer’s successor, Satya Nadella, buttressed by its strong performance in cloud services and its backing of OpenAI. Ballmer takes a lot of pride in Nadella and doesn’t mind claiming the W on the company’s succession plan. “We had absolutely the right guy,” he says. “Nobody ever has a doubt about that, but that’s a guy I identified within a year or so after him joining the company. I rotated him [through] jobs three times to keep giving him different experiences. I mean, it’s all him, but what can I do? I offer the guy experiences.”

The relationship between Ballmer and Gates, such as there is these days, is complicated. Ballmer was the best man at Gates’s wedding, though now the two are no longer in regular contact, with Ballmer saying it was “probably a few years ago” when they last spoke. “They’re two extremely different people,” Lucovsky says of Ballmer and Gates. “They worked together at Microsoft because they needed each other…. They don’t need each other anymore.”

But Ballmer, admittedly “a shameless Microsoft booster,” remains plugged in with the goings-on at the company—and traditional rivals like Apple, which have seemed to lag behind on the AI front. “Apple’s being pretty pragmatic. They’re using technology that was built by somebody else and they’re embedding it in ways that seem reasonably smart, and [that’s] what they should do,” Ballmer says of the company’s June announcement about a partnership with OpenAI that will bring ChatGPT features into its devices.

“Microsoft, like Apple, is integrating these technologies into our products,” he says, while pointing out that Microsoft “has so many more products and scenarios because of the Office applications.” He also notes that Microsoft appeals to developers because of its cloud platform and has a more nurtured relationship with OpenAI that “lets us both try to serve the consumer with these technologies over the open internet.”

Unlike Gates, who has sold off huge chunks of his shares in the company, Ballmer has held on to most of his. And so it is little surprise that Ballmer is extremely bullish on AI, specifically Microsoft’s prospects in the AI arms race. “I think Microsoft is in an outstanding position,” Ballmer says, his voice turning raspy like a pirate. “I think they’re kicking ass. What they have on the back end: kicking ass. The willingness to spend on capital and R and D: kicking ass, kicking ass.”

At this moment I feel as though I’m listening to the old Ballmer, the one who used to galvanize Microsoft employees with rousing speeches. But it might actually be more like a proud papa. “Clippers, Microsoft, and my kids,” Ballmer says. “That’s what I got for babies.”

And Intuit Dome, he says, “will be here a lot longer than I will.”

“People may have no idea that I had anything to do with it,” he adds, “but man, people will know Intuit Dome for a long time.”