- Bill Gates had one big question on his mind when he stepped down as CEO of Microsoft.
- He said he wondered, “Was I going to see the company fade in terms of its excellence?”
- Gates was succeeded first by Steve Ballmer and later by Satya Nadella, though he’s become more involved amid the AI race.
It’s not easy handing over the reins of the company you created — just ask Bill Gates.
Gates worried about the company’s future when he ended his tenure as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, he said in an interview Microsoft posted Thursday.
“I’ve had two successors, and boy, do I feel lucky because as I went off to do the foundation work, the one thing that plagued me was, was I going to see the company fade in terms of its excellence, and would I be haunted by should I go back, should I not go back?” he said.
The billionaire Microsoft cofounder was succeeded as CEO by Steve Ballmer, who led the company from 2000 to 2014.
Gates wrote in his his memoir, “Source Code,” which came out last month, that he gave a 4% stake to Ballmer to convince him to quit business school and join Microsoft. Once Ballmer came aboard in 1980, he “became the 24-hour-a-day partner I needed,” Gates wrote.
Ballmer was later succeeded by Satya Nadella, who has held the role since taking over in 2014.
Gates says his fears were unfounded in hindsight since Ballmer “took us to new heights” and Nadella has done well at “navigating what even today remains one of the most complex CEO jobs in the world.”
The company has notched several important milestones since Gates departed as CEO.
Its market cap has grown substantially, hitting a record $3 trillion dollars late last year. The company released the first Xbox in 2001 and has snapped up video game makers Mojang and Activision Blizzard. It also acquired companies like GitHub and LinkedIn. In recent years, it’s poured billions into a partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
“It makes me feel so good that I get to just come in and play a very bit role of doing product reviews, learning about AI, you know, getting some help from Microsoft on the work that I’m doing,” Gates added. “And it’s allowed me, you know, to throw everything in and to have the incredible resources that my Microsoft ownership created.”
While Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000, he continued to serve on the company’s board of directors until 2020, when he stepped down following allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female employees.
He has spent much of his time since on the philanthropic foundation he started with his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.
BI’s Ashley Stewart reported last year that Gates remains “intimately involved in the company’s operations” behind the scenes, reviewing products, advising on strategy, and recruiting top executives.
Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesperson, told BI at the time that Gates’ role as a technical advisor, which he began in 2014, hadn’t substantially changed since he vacated his board seat.
The “insistence on portraying the role of Bill Gates as ‘pulling strings’ at Microsoft,” Shaw told BI at the time, “is fundamentally inaccurate and at odds with reality.”
“With respect to Microsoft, stepping down from the board in no way means stepping away from the company,” Gates wrote in 2020 about the move. “Microsoft will always be an important part of my life’s work and I will continue to be engaged with Satya and the technical leadership to help shape the vision and achieve the company’s ambitious goals.”
