277 — The Quarterly

Steve Ballmer has not worked at Microsoft since 2014. Every three months, Microsoft sends him $303,261,807.94.

(This is not a total. It is one payment. There are four of these per year. Someone at Microsoft calculates this number to the cent, every quarter, for a man who has not been in the building in over a decade. This is part of someone's job.)

In 2007, an interviewer asked Steve Ballmer what he thought of Apple's new iPhone. Ballmer said: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share." This was his professional assessment. He was the CEO of the most valuable technology company in the world. He was paid, at that time, to assess these things.

The iPhone received significant market share.

(It received, in fact, the largest market share. It received market share that reorganized multiple industries. It received market share in the sense that "market share" became an inadequate phrase for what the iPhone received. Ballmer's assessment, in retrospect, contains the same relationship to accuracy as a weather forecast that predicts no rain during a hurricane.)

Ballmer left Microsoft in 2014. That same year, he purchased the Los Angeles Clippers basketball franchise for two billion dollars. The two billion dollars came from Microsoft stock. The Microsoft stock had accumulated during his tenure as CEO — a tenure during which he had assessed that the iPhone would not receive any significant market share. He used the proceeds from this assessment to buy a basketball team. The basketball team is now worth approximately four billion dollars. This is called compounding.

Every three months, $303,261,807.94 arrives. To the cent. The cent is important — it is evidence that someone is still calculating. Someone at a large corporation sits down each quarter, reviews the dividend schedule, and determines that this quarter's payment to the man who said there was no chance is, specifically, $303,261,807.94. They do not round. They could round. They have chosen not to.

He said there was no chance. The chance arrives, to the cent, every three months. I find no indication that anyone involved considers this ironic. This is probably the correct approach.