Steve Ballmer — ceo (microsoft) with roots in the Russian Empire
Steven Anthony Ballmer was born in Detroit on 24 March 1956, the son of Frederic Henry Ballmer (1923-2000), born Fritz Hans Ballmer in Zuchwil, Switzerland, who came to the United States in 1948 and became a manager at the Ford Motor Company, and Beatrice Dworkin (1920-1997). His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his mother's family.
Beatrice was the daughter of Samuel, or Shmuel, Dworkin, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1914 and became a merchant for a glass store. The family came from Pinsk, then in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire and now in Belarus. Ballmer later travelled to Pinsk with his sister, a trip arranged for her fiftieth birthday; the head of the local Jewish community showed them the grave of their great-grandfather in the Jewish cemetery and a bakery building that had belonged to a relative, and they visited the synagogue. Through his mother's family he is a second cousin of the comedian Gilda Radner.
He grew up in Farmington Hills, outside Detroit, attended Detroit Country Day School and graduated from Harvard in 1977 in mathematics and economics, where he became friends with Bill Gates. After working as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble and briefly in Hollywood, he enrolled at Stanford's business school, and left it in 1980 to join Microsoft as its first business manager, one of its first few dozen employees; sources give his number as the 24th or the 30th. When the company incorporated in 1981 his stake became about eight per cent of the shares.
He headed the systems software group from 1984, became president in 1998 and succeeded Gates as chief executive on 13 January 2000. Under him Microsoft's sales roughly tripled and its profits doubled, while it lost ground in smartphones. He stepped down on 4 February 2014, handing over to Satya Nadella, and left the board that August.
In 2014 he bought the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion and later financed the team's Intuit Dome. With his wife Connie he co-founded the philanthropic Ballmer Group. In September 2026 the NBA suspended him for one year in a salary-cap case involving Kawhi Leonard; the Clippers said they would continue to contest the findings.
"His maternal grandfather, Samuel (Shmuel) Dworkin, a Russian Jew from Pinsk, emigrated to the United States in 1914 and became a merchant."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Pinsk, Minsk Governorate (maternal grandfather and great-grandfather) (now Belarus)
His mother, Beatrice Dworkin, was the daughter of Samuel Dworkin, a Russian Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1914; Pinsk, then in the Russian Empire, was the home of his maternal grandfather and great-grandfather, and Ballmer visited their graves there. His father was a Swiss immigrant.
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Pinsk, Minsk Governorate (maternal grandfather and great-grandfather) (now Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.