After Giving Away $8 Billion, The Ballmers Are Doing Something No Mega-Donor Has Ever Done

Steve and Connie Ballmer have donated more than $8 billion since founding the Ballmer Group in 2015, making them among the most significant philanthropists in the United States, though they operate with a significantly lower public profile than comparable donors. Their giving has focused on economic mobility, with major gifts including $425 million to the University of Oregon to establish the Ballmer Institute for Children's Behavioral Health, $80 million to NPR for digital transformation, $23 million to Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, and significant investments in foster care reform, early childhood education, and community violence reduction across southeastern Michigan, Los Angeles County, and Washington State. Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the LA Clippers, has an estimated net worth of $177 billion. Connie Ballmer has been leading their philanthropic work since long before those numbers arrived, and she is the one who pushed the couple toward giving in the first place. Their announcement in July 2026 represents a significant departure from how most donors of their scale operate.

Rather than maintaining centralized control, the Ballmer Group is spinning its three regional offices into independent nonprofits, to be known as MoveUp Southeast Michigan, MoveUp LA, and MoveUp Washington, each operating on its own with continued funding from the Ballmers. The decision to hand control to the people closest to the work is the core of the announcement. Local leaders, community organizations, and the communities the philanthropy serves will make decisions about where the money goes going forward. The Ballmer Group itself will narrow its focus to a smaller set of large, scalable national initiatives rather than continuing to direct regional grantmaking from the top. Steve and Connie Ballmer said in a joint statement that their intention was to ensure that these local philanthropies become permanent, ongoing resources in each region. Connie Ballmer began the couple's philanthropy nearly 25 years ago, rooted in her work with children in Washington State's foster care system, and the philosophy she brought to it then, that no single issue puts a child in crisis and that you have to take on the whole system, is the same philosophy behind the current restructuring. Real change, she has always believed, is built locally by people who understand the place they are in. The money is staying. The control is moving.

Source:https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/steve-connie-ballmer-splitting-8-153127006.html