Locking in an asset

One of Ballmer’s first moves as owner was to award Rivers a $50 million contract extension that runs through the 2018-19 season. Amid the chaos created by Sterling’s racist remarks, Rivers emerged as a calming presence. From his days at Microsoft, Ballmer recognized that he had a strong brand asset in Rivers.

“You’ve got to build an interesting product, have a brand that people can understand, try to build a product that can be successful,” Ballmer said. He added: “There’s a natural shorter product cycle because players get older. I think the notion that you have to be tenacious and hard core really applies. You can’t be ripping things up and starting over again.”

Ballmer was raised outside Detroit, where his father, Frederic, was a manager at Ford Motor Co.

“When he was up, he was up,” Ballmer said of his father. “When he was mad, you knew it.”

He chuckled and added: “I think I’m a little like my dad. When I’m up, I’m up. When I’m down, I’m down.”

His family lived comfortably, he said, but was not well-off. He said he was able to attend private school with the help of academic scholarships.

“My dad was an immigrant who came here with nothing and worked his way up as a payroll clerk for Ford,” Ballmer said. “I’m going to guess he probably maxed out around $45,000 a year.”

Ballmer said he did not believe his father had finished high school.

“He never told us for sure whether he graduated or not,” he said. “Even in his last days, my sister and I tried to get him to ‘fess up.’ ”

Ballmer earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard, where he lived down the hall from Bill Gates. Ballmer attended Stanford Graduate School of Business for a year before dropping out to join Microsoft, which Gates had founded with Paul Allen.

“When I joined Microsoft, we were not an ‘A’ team,” Ballmer said. “We were doing some ‘A’ work because we had three ‘A’ players. We weren’t very deep. We had three or four guys, all guys who were amazing, and then we had a bunch of people who were mediocre or worse.”