News Ballmer sells Microsoft shares

Made me chuckle!

 

This is why I don't get why people make such a fuss about it. Only 18% of his stock and he still makes billions.

Pull out a couple billion (enough to remain happily wealthy even if everything else fails), invest in something solid and relatively safe like gold, leave the majority in your riskier yet potentially more lucrative stocks. Seems like a fair plan to me.

 

well he is getting on in years maybe he wants to just go nuts with some insane spending money...

 

It's probably just to pay his yearly tax bill

 

Or he wants to sell his stocks before the second market crash sometime in 2011.

 

Maybe he's investing in a money making scheme with a Nigerian businessman who needs his help

 

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has revealed that he is selling a large chunk of his stock in Microsoft, leading some to worry that he has lost faith in the _US economy_.

fixt

 

He sold some shares, so what? If he sold 50+ per cent of his shares AND stepped down I'd be worried about MS. This way he's just trying to shift some money around to evade taxes. We all do that... on a smaller scale, admittedly.

 

Bad taste maybe, but I don't understand how this is racist?

 

Maybe he wanted to buy a really big boat?

 

Can you kinect the dots?

 

Dewey did on Malcolm in the Middle!

 

People, people, people, settle down. "assist in tax planning" <--- That right there is all you need to know. The Bush era tax cuts on capital gains expire this year and currently it doesn't look like they will be reinstated. Ballmer is simply making a financial move so that he can cover the taxes he will incur on the rest of his shares should the tax cuts not be reinstated. Any speculation on him manipulating Gates or losing faith in his company are ludicrous at best.

 

Not impossible, though.

 

Microsoft should be an inspiration to us all. They are proof that you can still sell a sucky product and make lots and lots of money, all you need is to leverage unfair business practices against the rest of the community.

The only way they could make something that didn't suck was if they decided to enter the vacuum cleaner business.

 

Don't worry, maybe he just needs the money to buy a toupee!

 

Amazing how such a bug, wealthy company can be so bad, and do so many stupid things and have so many failures.

 

I couldn't agree more. It would be like if 95% of the cars on the road were the Ford Pinto!

 

Hi, I have an air conditioner. Just like my PC, it works great until I open windows.

 

The 'managing my finances for tax' reason sounds phony.

Apparently Balmer is living on borrowed time as the Microsoft board are losing patience with his screw-ups, the latest and greatest being Windows Phone 7.

BlackRock, one of the biggest holders of Microsoft shares, has cut its stake in the software company below 5 percent too.

It also makes me laugh about the low take-up rate of the old Microsoft cash-cow, MS Office. The business take-up is not great, with "the most common concern IT professionals had about deployment was [re-]training employees to use the [EASY TO USE] Ribbon interface, first introduced in Office 2007—a concern identified by fully 45 percent of respondents. Nearly three years after its introduction, it's unclear the extent to which the Ribbon actually baffles users, but there's no doubt that the fact that it might certainly worries thinly stretched IT departments. "

Combine those two with the woeful tales on Zune and the shoddy Xbox, and the spectacular success of Apple in mp3 players/tablet devices/phones/games, and you must have a very worried executive. If I was Balmer, I'd sell high too.