FULL-COURT PRESS

Microsoft made him one of the richest men alive. Now STEVE BALLMER is chasing one of the few prizes money (alone) can't buy: an NBA championship for his team, the Los Angeles Clippers, whose staggeringly expensive state-of-the-art arena opens this summer

- TOM KLUDT

“AH, SHIT."

SAYS STEVE BALLMER.

"We wound up having to go with the metal here, didn't we?" The multibillionaire is inspecting every crevice of Intuit Dome, the future home of his beloved Los Angeles Clippers and, in his estimation, a "basketball mecca." Donning a hard hat and safety vest, Ballmer takes me on a tour he's given to the likes of Disney boss Bob Iger, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, and hiphop mogul Jay-Z. "When we're walking through the building together," Ballmer says of the iconic rapper, "nobody notices me." Perhaps, but when I walk through the sprawling project with Ballmer, none of his desires goes unnoticed. Like with Ballmer's frustration over a metal divider; lead designer Bill Hanway reassures him there will be a transparent glass one, just as requested, when the new NBA season tips off this fall.

But that's still months out on this April afternoon as the Clippers owner trudges through an obstacle course of cable drums and stacks of wood, where roughly 1,100 workers are conducting a score of beeps and grinding metal. Ballmer, though, is already in launch mode, surveying the dust-filled rooms with the same meticulous energy he once brought to Microsoft. "This and the team, that's our product," he tells me. "This is what you experience as a customer." In another life, that product might have been Windows 95. Or the Xbox. Ballmer's legacy is inextricably tied to Microsoft, where he joined his old Harvard pal Bill Gates as the company's 30th employee and would eventually spend more than a decade at the helm. "We basically helped democratize computing," he notes.

TEAM SPIRIT

Ballmer congratulates George after a Clippers OT win against the Celtics, 2019; cheering on the team next to Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel (right) in 2015.