After investing in Twitter, Steve Ballmer gave up investing (TWTR)

pulse

June 1, 2017 2:00 AM

Steve Ballmer explained his massive stake in Twitter as part of a short-lived career, now abandoned career, to be a big investor.

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California — When Steve Ballmer retired from the CEO job at Microsoft in 2014, he set his sights on becoming a tech investor and soon made a big bet on Twitter, acquiring a 4% stake.

That bet has not turned out very well so far, and now the former Microsoft head honcho admits he's lost his taste for investing.

Ballmer didn't blame Twitter's poor stock performance for souring him on investing, but he laughed about it, saying it was part of a "magical decision" he made at that time to try out a new career.

While he wouldn't say if he's sold off much of his Twitter stake, Ballmer confirmed that he still has a sizeable stake.

A believer and a critic

These days, Ballmer doesn't even tune into the quarterly conference calls, though he says he still believes in the company, its role in sharing information real-time and its ability to let people talk directly to each other.

"I still have a lot of money into the concept that says there is an opportunity to make it into a real business," he said, although he also added he doesn't see "exactly" how the company would immediately do that.

"Being a CEO is a hard job, right? I can speak to that. Being a CEO of two things, I can't even imagine," he said. "You can't do that if you are really going to do the right thing for your shareholders."

Interestingly, Ballmer acknowledged that he's never really gotten into tweeting much himself, feeling like his tweets were sort of boring or repetitive.

"I just felt like, how many times could I tweet, 'Ho! Great game today!'" he laughed. "I don't want to be that guy. I want to have something interesting to say."

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