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Steve Ballmer said that Warren Buffett partially influences his investment strategy.
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But Ballmer, whose net worth is greater than Buffett's, has an unconventional investment portfolio.
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More than 80% of Ballmer's portfolio is held in Microsoft stock, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Steve Ballmer has an unorthodox investment approach.
The first Microsoft CEO worth $151 billion, per y Bloomberg Billionaires Indexmaking him the ninth richest person in the world.
That puts him ahead of a celebrity investor Warren Buffett almost $10 billion.
In an interview published on Sunday, Ballmer said The Wall Street Journal that his investment strategy is partly influenced by Buffett, who has long said that most stock pickers can't beat the returns of a general index fund. But there is one key difference.
The Journal reported that Ballmer keeps more than 80% of his portfolio in Microsoft stock. The rest is held in index funds. Ballmer declined to say how big his stake in Microsoft is.
“Microsoft outperformed almost every other asset I could have owned,” Ballmer told the Journal.
Ballmer's investment strategy goes against conventional wisdom, which suggests that people reduce their risk by diversify their capital across different asset classes. And the world's richest people typically go beyond stocks and bonds to invest in illiquid assets like private equity and real estate. Ballmer said he was “mostly dialing out of private equity.”
To be sure, Ballmer didn't always buck the trend.
The 68-year-old tried to diversify in the past but said he struggled to find money managers that consistently beat the market.
“The only stock I'm still studying is Microsoft, because that's the No. 1 thing I own overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly,” Balmer told the outlet.
Ballmer started his career at Microsoft in 1980 and followed the founder Bill Gates as CEO in 2000.
According to regulatory filings, Ballmer held 333 million shares, or a 4% stake, in Microsoft when he stepped down as CEO in 2014.
Microsoft shares are up 16.1% this year. The Seattle-based tech giant has been ahead of the AI race with huge bets on startups like Sam Altman's OpenAI and France Mistral AI.
In October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an earnings call that the company's AI business was on track to peak at an annual revenue run rate of $10 billion next quarter.
This would make it the fastest business in Microsoft's history to reach that milestone, Nadella added.