Steve Ballmer, the world’s 10th richest person, likes his way of engaging in civic engagement across party lines rather than writing checks to specific candidates.
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Many billionaires put money into politics, and everyone chooses a team. George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Reid Hoffman all wear blue hats before cutting checks to liberal super PACs, while Charles Koch, the Walton brothers, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, all wear blue hats before cutting checks to liberal super PACs. Lined up behind Republicans. But the exception that proves this rule may be former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. He believes he can make his mark on politics by fighting misinformation in a strictly bipartisan way, helping voters sort fact from fiction.
“James Madison said that a national government without information or the ability to access it is a prelude to farce or tragedy or both,” Ballmer said this week, echoing the words of the fourth U.S. president. I borrowed it and told Forbes. “Come on! It’s been the government’s job from the beginning to provide data to the people.” However, after stepping down from leading Microsoft in 2014 and being encouraged by his wife Connie to become more involved in philanthropy, E. Ballmer, the world’s 10th richest man with a net worth of $123 billion, found the government data to be damning. It’s missing.
So in 2017, he founded USAFacts, a bipartisan civics initiative that collects, organizes, and publishes vast amounts of official data on everything from the economy and education to crime and immigration. It began with the goal of creating an annual “Government 10-K” modeled after the documents that public companies must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ballmer has been personally funding the project for seven years. In this election year, he admitted spending more than $40 million to get the facts straight. This includes approximately 15-minute “Just The Facts” videos hosted by Ballmer that focus on immigration, the federal budget, the economy, energy, health, health care, and “America by the Numbers,” respectively6. Includes production and promotion of the story series. ” They were all published on YouTube. The first two episodes aired on Fox News and the last four episodes aired on NewsNation. The promotion includes a national ad buy on more than 20 channels, including non-political channels like NFL Network and Hallmark, as well as promotion of the site on social media.
In total, Mr. Ballmer has pumped more than $100 million into the company, which now employs just under 50 people. is incorporated as a limited liability company and operates as a non-profit. Ballmer said it is being funded with after-tax dollars. “It’s just a personal expense,” he says. “From a tax and fiscal standpoint, it’s not that different from buying groceries.” The previously unreported nine-figure figure would not make Ballmer the top political spender in America. . Michael Bloomberg’s decision to spend more than $1 billion on his bizarre 2020 presidential campaign will mean the former New York mayor has secured that title. It will take years to come, but this will make him one of the most civically active billionaires in the nation.
“We always loved Ross Perot poster boards,” said Ballmer, who bought an expanded infomercial-style slot on national television when he ran for president twice in the 1990s, filled with pie charts. about the late billionaire who delivered his presentation directly to voters. “Our ‘Just The Facts’ video? Let’s call it the 2024 version of Ross Perot’s old posterboard. ” The first four have collectively racked up more than 45 million views on YouTube, TV and other platforms since the first video was published on August 1, with at least 400 views, according to YouTube Analytics. It shows that 10,000 people watched the entire 15 minute video. All the evidence. In Ballmer’s eyes, there is at least some demand for what USAFacts is creating. The site’s newsletter also has about 350,000 subscribers.
Key to Mr. Ballmer’s approach is to avoid any appearance of partisanship. USAFacts uses only official government-collected data to avoid potential biases that may come with other sources such as academic papers or think tanks. “I think if you have left-wing and right-wing economists, it’s not as much of a science to me as it was when I majored in applied mathematics and economics,” the 68-year-old says. “So I would have liked to think that those academic opinions were completely neutral. I don’t think they are.”
Mr. Ballmer has also expressed a desire to be seen as neutral, and has not made the large political donations that his fellow billionaires have participated in. However, it has proven difficult to completely distance yourself from the conflict. “There was a time in the past when I was a political donor,” he told Forbes. (His largest ever donation in federal records appears to have been $50,000 to Barack Obama’s inaugural committee). “The only things I’ve accomplished in the last 10 years have been people I really know.” Ballmer was a 2017-2024 resident of Washington state, according to Federal Election Commission filings. He donated nearly $38,000 to five Democratic candidates, including three, and more than $40,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. A spokesperson contacted after the interview declined to comment on his political contributions.
Meanwhile, his wife Connie is the family’s major donor, with FEC filings showing she donated $1.25 million to groups supporting Kamala Harris this term and to liberal groups between 2019 and 2022. sent more than $14 million to “We’re two people. We’re independent of each other,” Ballmer says. “I can’t control my wife,” he repeated with a laugh later in the interview, “and I never want to!” Although he also admits there are some issues, His perspective is clear in his public statements, comments on Just The Facts videos, and his and Connie’s charitable donations. They include budget deficits (which are too high) and climate change (which is real and bad). But he promises that USAFacts is “not going to cook the book.”
The 68-year-old prefers his approach to donating directly to candidates anyway. He claims it’s his way to do public service, in addition to his philanthropy, which has been estimated at more than $4 billion over the past decade (the Ballmers are No. 8 on Forbes’ list of America’s largest philanthropists). ). And unlike those gifts, USA Facts is not organized as a 501(c)3, so Mr. Ballmer receives no tax benefits from it. Data collection has helped inform his philanthropy, making him more supportive of education and preschool initiatives, for example.
In an age of misinformation and badmouthing, Ballmer is quick to acknowledge the limits of betting on fact-based data analysis. I’m not naive about it,” he says. But he has no plans to slow down, aiming to expand the organization’s staff and the data they collect to include state and local sources in the coming years. “The purpose is to try to ground people in the reality as it is, and potentially partisan views of how we got here and where we’re going. It’s not a partisan view,” Ballmer said. “Now, how many tens of millions of people are interested in that? Yeah.”
