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Ballmer Sells Part of his Stake in Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "The Financial Times reports that Steve Ballmer has sold part of his MS shares (my early morning math isn't very good, it seems a shade under 10%). Short of cash? Parking tickets? Or the start of a strategy to get rid of it all without causing too much upset in one go? No idea, but speculation is sure to be with us for a while."
It seems odd to me that a company that has so much cash and such high profit margins requires mandatory fast growth, but then I am a humble programmer, not a financial guy :-)
The whole idea goes against my basic philosophy of "take what you need and leave some for others". Not to go off on a huge tangent, but in the western world, greed seems to far outweigh issues like building an enjoyable and productive career. As Josepgh Campbell used to say "follow your bliss"...
That said, Balmer probably has some fun with Microsoft :-)
-Mark
That being said, I don't think Ballmer falls under the category of "low paid".
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
At the company meeting last year, Balmer (memory is fuzzy) he's 47, and plans to return in 10 or 15 years (can't remember which) - I think 10. No Monkeyboy -- but he did play a song from his favorite Broadway play, some 70's wierd shit sounded like Hair or Jesus Christ Superstar. Instead of Monkeyboy or the usual miltary analogies, they played a bunch of videos where people talked about how they failed and what they learned from it -- it was a reaction to Enron/Worldcom "ethics"...
Important thing is Balmer is ten years and out. MS people are getting old -- I think average age is 35 now. Every great story has an ending...
Some interesting tidbits from a parallel article.
Ballmer has only dropped about 15% of his ownership in MS since his involvement with the company as compared to Gates and Allen who each own only 50% of their original stake.
Contrary to intution, MS shares actually rose as this occured, climbing 6 cents to close at 24.22 on Friday. MS had declined 7 of the last 9 trading sessions.
It seems that the public hasn't taken this as an indication that MS is going the way of the iLoo anytime soon.
So, Dubya signs a tax-cut which includes lots of short-term and long-term capitals gains cuts, and Ballmer suddenly decides to sell a lot of stock.
Gee, I wonder why.
For those speculating on other things, I think Ballmer, et. al. *KNOW* that the profitability of MS is eventually doomed, but can't think of a way of getting out big time without crashing the company. So, they sell off here, they sell off there, and do the standard "screw the employee, shareholders, and everybody else not part of the good-buddy club" routine.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
Of course Ballmer wants to diversify. Microsoft stock isn't going anywhere fast (down or up). They are a large company that won't be doubling their revenue any time soon. Why have all your wealth in a stock that isn't likely to go up very much? Of course he can't say that so he says "diversify my portfolio"
Ballmer now sold 40 Million shares, compared to that Bill Gates sold 400 Million or about 40% of his shares in the last years.
If Gates and Ballmer don't know where MSFT-stock is headed, who does?
All of the top brass at Microsoft regularly sell off parts of their shares. Gates has been doing it for years, at a relatively regular pace.
The thing is, most of the upper management of Microsoft that have been with the company from early on have most of their wealth in Microsoft shares. The problem is that they have to sell it off slowly or they wouldn't manage to get a decent price for it.
What's interesting about this particular sale is the timing of it (never mind that it's one of the largest insider stock sales ever). With MS stock price so low and the MS/SCO suit going so well, you'd think he'd see it as a good time to buy.
Diversifying is one thing, selling at a stupidly low price is quite another. So naturally enough, we're all wondering what Steve knows that we don't.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Like it or not, Microsoft is overpriced. If I would take Microsoft's market capitalization (259 billion $) and put the money into low risk investments at 5% interest, I would make 259 * 0.05 = 12.95 billion in profits per year.
Microsoft makes only about 10 billion in profits, so it's severly overpriced, especially considering the fact that stocks are very risky.
Microsoft has just recently raised licensing costs (through Licensing 6.0) but does on the other hand give huge discounts to all major customers if they may go to Linux. I'd say that in the future there is not much room anymore to bleed their customers.
Actually Bill Gates used to own almost 50% as AFAIR. Now he holds about 11% ...
Which means he has gotten rid of almost 80% of his holdings.
Yahoo -> MSFT -> insider , looking at last year show an almost scary mass exodus...