The tenth richest individual on this planet, Steve Ballmer likes his nonpartisan means of civic engagement higher than reducing exams for explicit applicants.Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Team/Pasadena Celebrity-Information by means of Getty Pictures
A variety of billionaires invest in politics, and so they all pick out a crew after they achieve this. George Soros, Tom Steyer and Reid Hoffman all don blue caps ahead of reducing exams to liberal tremendous PACs, whilst Charles Koch, the Walton siblings and Elon Musk, the arena’s richest guy, are all covered up in the back of Republicans. The exception who proves the rule of thumb, regardless that, could also be Steve Ballmer, the previous Microsoft CEO who thinks he could make a mark on politics by way of preventing incorrect information—in a strictly nonpartisan approach—to assist citizens sift reality from fiction.
“James Madison mentioned that a well-liked authorities, with out knowledge or the facility to head get it, is a prelude to a farce or a tragedy or each,” Ballmer instructed Forbes this week, paraphrasing the fourth U.S. president. “Come on! It’s the authorities’s process from the begin to supply information to the populace.” However after he stepped down from main Microsoft in 2014—and his spouse, Connie, driven him to get extra curious about philanthropic paintings—Ballmer, whose $123 billion estimated web price makes him the 10th richest individual on this planet, discovered the federal government information woefully missing.
So, in 2017, he based USAFacts, a nonpartisan civic initiative that collects, cleans up, and publishes reams of reputable information about the whole thing from the financial system and schooling to crime and immigration. It began with the function of manufacturing an annual “Executive 10-Ok,” modeled after the paperwork that public firms should report with the Securities and Trade Fee. For seven years, Ballmer has in my view funded the venture. This election yr, he confirms he’s spending over $40 million to get the details out. That comes with generating and selling a six-episode sequence of more or less 15-minute “Simply The Information” movies hosted by way of Ballmer and targeted, respectively, on immigration, the federal finances, the financial system, power, well being and healthcare and “The united states Through The Numbers.” They all have been printed on YouTube; the primary two episodes ran on Fox Information and the general 4 ran on NewsNation. Promotion has incorporated national advert buys on greater than two dozen channels—together with apolitical ones just like the NFL Community and Hallmark—and pushing the web page on social media.
Altogether, Ballmer has poured over $100 million into the corporate, which now has just below 50 staff. is integrated as a restricted legal responsibility corporate and operates as a not-for-profit. Ballmer says he price range it with after-tax greenbacks. “It’s only a non-public expense,” he says. “It isn’t all that other from purchasing groceries, from a tax and fiscal viewpoint.” That nine-digit determine, which has now not been in the past reported, wouldn’t make Ballmer The united states’s most sensible political spender—Michael Bloomberg’s resolution to pump over $1 billion right into a quixotic presidential bid in 2020 has secured the previous New York mayor that identify, most probably for future years—but it surely puts him some of the country’s maximum civically engaged billionaires.
“We all the time liked Ross Perot’s poster forums,” Ballmer says, relating to the overdue billionaire who, when he ran for president two times within the Nineties, bought prolonged infomercial-style slots on nationwide TV to offer pie chart-filled shows without delay to citizens. “Our ‘Simply The Information’ movies? Let me name that the 2024 model of Ross Perot’s previous poster forums.” The primary 4 have racked up over 45 million perspectives general on YouTube, tv and different platforms for the reason that first was once launched on Aug. 1, and YouTube analytics display a minimum of 4 million other people watched an entire 15-minute video there—all evidence, in Ballmer’s eyes, that there’s a minimum of some call for for what USAFacts is generating. The web page’s e-newsletter additionally has some 350,000 subscribers.
Key to Ballmer’s means is fending off any look of partisanship. USAFacts works handiest with reputable government-collected information, hoping to steer clear of the potential of bias that may include different assets like instructional papers or assume tanks. “I imagine that if you’ll be able to have left-wing and right-wing economists, it’s much less of a science, to me, than it was once after I majored in carried out math and economics,” the 68-year-old says. “So the ones instructional critiques, I want I believed they have been solely impartial. I don’t assume they’re.”
Ballmer has additionally proven a want to look impartial himself, and hasn’t performed the similar roughly high-dollar political giving that his a few of his fellow billionaires partake in. However staying out of the fray solely has confirmed tricky. “There was once an afternoon and age the place, a very long time in the past, I made some political contributions,” he tells Forbes. (His biggest ever contribution in federal information seems to were $50,000 to Barack Obama’s inaugural committee). “The one factor I’ve made within the final ten years was once the individuals who I knew in point of fact smartly.” Between 2017 and 2024, Ballmer donated nearly $38,000 general to 5 Democratic applicants, 3 in Washington state (the place he lives), and he additionally gave greater than $40,000 to the Democratic Congressional Marketing campaign Committee throughout that point, according to Federal Election Fee filings. Reached after the interview, a spokesperson declined to touch upon his political donations.
His spouse Connie, in the meantime, is the massive donor within the circle of relatives: She has given $1.25 million to teams supporting Kamala Harris this cycle and despatched over $14 million to liberal teams between 2019 and 2022, FEC filings display. “We’re two other people; we’re unbiased of one another,” Ballmer says. “I don’t keep an eye on my spouse,” he reiterated later within the interview, chuckling, “and would by no means wish to!” There also are some problems, he recognizes, the place his viewpoint is plain from a few of his public statements, his feedback in his Simply The Information movies and his and Connie’s philanthropic giving. The ones come with the finances deficit (it’s too excessive) and local weather trade (it’s actual, and unhealthy). However he guarantees that USAFacts “received’t prepare dinner the books.”
The 68-year-old prefers his means over giving without delay to applicants, anyway. It’s his approach, he argues, of doing a public carrier on most sensible of his philanthropy, estimated at greater than $4 billion over the last decade (incomes the Ballmer couple the #8 spot on Forbes’s listing of the country’s greatest philanthropists). And in contrast to the ones items, Ballmer derives no tax take pleasure in USA Information, because it’s now not arranged as a 501(c)3. The information assortment, in flip, is helping tell his philanthropy—it’s helped make him extra supportive of schooling and Pre-Ok tasks, as an example.
In an age of viral incorrect information and soundbites, Ballmer readily recognizes the constraints of making a bet on fact-based information research: “Are we going to utterly trade the whole thing? I’m now not naive about that,” he says. However he has no plans to decelerate, and objectives to increase the group’s workforce and the information they gather into state and native assets as smartly over the following few years. “The aim is certainly one of looking to floor other people within the truth of what’s, now not with some probably partisan view of ways we were given right here or a partisan view of the place we cross,” Ballmer says. “Now, do I believe there are tens of tens of millions of people who find themselves keen on that? Yeah.”
