Steve Ballmer's son reflects on growing up in high net worth family

Pete Ballmer is a standup comedian living in San Francisco. He reflects on his childhood growing up in a high-net-worth family.

Pete Ballmer, Timbaba/Getty Images, Abanti Chowdhury/BI

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with 29-year-old Pete Ballmer, a standup comedian living in San Francisco and one of the sons of billionaire and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Up until I was in late elementary school, my understanding was that my family was rich, but I didn't know that we were globally and historically rich.

I knew that my dad was a big guy at Microsoft, and I remember a kid asking me how many bathrooms my house had. Another kid randomly asked me, "Does your mom drive a Mercedes?" And I was like, "No, she drives a Ford Fusion."

Growing up, we didn't get more expensive Christmas presents than most of the other upper-middle-class kids I knew. I got the new Gameboy one year, and in high school, I asked for a bench and a set of weights. Another year, my parents got us a ping pong table that we set up in the basement.

My parents hated seeing us make stupid purchases

Their approach toward money, in broad strokes, was: If it's something that you ultimately need, we can buy that for you. They both hated seeing stupid or unnecessary purchases being made, so the implicit rule was don't be wasteful; be smart about what you spend your money on.

For example, I started playing lacrosse in fourth grade and asked my mom for a nicer lacrosse stick. She was like, "No, you just started playing. You don't need the nice lacrosse stick."

I got the less-nice lacrosse stick.

I'm sure I asked my parents for some money here and there, but it was never, "Just ask us, and we'll get you the money." I mean, I didn't really care about what I was wearing, and my brothers and I were fine with driving our dad's old '98 Lincoln. We had an Xbox, and I was eating a lot of Chipotle with my friends. (I drove the neighborhood carpool and got paid in Chipotle gift cards — it was awesome.)

What more does a teenage boy even need at that point?

We didn't really talk about money

There were some indications that we were rich. Our family took really nice vacations, but as a kid, there was a disconnect between things and how much they cost. I just thought, "Oh, I guess we're in Japan, now."

For both my mom and my dad, having a lot of money was a relatively new experience, as was raising children. They raised us in line with how their parents raised them, and since they didn't grow up talking about wealth, they didn't talk about it with us, either.

It was nice to just be a kid and not really think about it, but as I grew up, I started feeling pretty uncomfortable that I was in a wealthier family than any of my peers. I didn't like that people had presuppositions of what I was like purely based on that.

My parents had an attitude of "rich kids are too much, and we don't like that," which was in some ways harmful since I was a rich kid.

But I started to derive pride from the fact that I wasn't as spoiled as I could be, that I didn't have gobs of money thrown upon me. People would say nice things about the way my brothers and I approached money.

I worked summer jobs and internships to save up

In elementary school, I got an allowance of $10 a week. I obviously didn't have any real need for it, and I'd forget to collect it from my mom probably over half the time.

Middle school is when I started to actually want things that were more expensive. I read about a new phone, the Palm Pre, and wanted to buy it. My parents agreed that they would pay for the phone plan if I paid for the phone. I worked as a caddy at a golf course near our house and saved up enough to buy it.

The summer after 9th grade, I started a landscaping company with my friends. It's funny to look back on — we were just a bunch of well-to-do suburban children. Let's just say we weren't doing as good a job as your average landscaping company might.

I also did a couple of software engineering internships during high school and college, which I got — I feel it's important for me to say — without connections.

My parents paid for all of my tuition and board in college, which is a lot of money. I used the money I saved from my internships to spend on things like meals out at restaurants, drinks at bars, occasional new clothes, and concerts.

After graduating, I borrowed $1,000 from my parents for an international trip I'd planned with some friends. But that wasn't enough to cover it, so I borrowed another $1,000 from one of my roommates because I didn't want to ask my parents for more money. The experience of not wanting to go back to your parents to ask for more is pretty human and universal; you don't want to be viewed as irresponsible.

Receiving an inheritance at 25

After college, I never considered not having a job, so I became a product manager at a game development company.

Then I inherited a sum of money from my grandfather when I turned 25. He had worked his way up to middle management at Ford and put the money he saved into Microsoft stock, which did pretty well and ended up being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time I received it.

When I first heard about it, I was a junior in college. My initial reaction was that I would decline it — I was still pretty uncomfortable with my family's wealth and figured I could get a pretty high-paying job in tech and wouldn't need their money.

But then I turned 25, and I didn't decline the money; in retrospect, that would have been a very silly decision.

I'd also started doing standup comedy in college and continued doing it on the side while I worked. After about four years of working as a product manager, I quit to pursue comedy full-time.

I'm now a paid regular at some comedy clubs in the Bay Area, and I've also done some festivals. I do around five shows a week in addition to an open mic or two, and I produce Don't Tell Comedy shows.

Between what I get from my inherited investments and my income from comedy, my money has remained pretty stable because of my spending habits.

I don't make many large purchases

I don't make many purchases that are over a few hundred dollars. I don't buy first-class plane tickets, for example, and I don't get new or pricey clothing very often. I bought a new jacket recently that was $120 or something.

I live in a two-bed, one-bath apartment with my girlfriend, and it's perfect for our purposes; it's no bigger than it has to be. I order food on Uber Eats more often than I probably should, but I also cook a lot and eat oatmeal pretty much every day. That's not a money-saving thing; I just friggin' love oatmeal.

I drive a 2015 Ford Focus that my parents bought for my younger brother after he totaled our dad's old '98 Lincoln in high school. I pay an embarrassingly high amount of money for my parking spot, though, because street parking in San Francisco can be tough, and I often leave a lot of expensive AV equipment in my car.

I also pay out of pocket for my healthcare, go on pricey trips like Burning Man, and make fairly substantial donations to causes that are significant to me.

My financial management moment-to-moment is just kind of pragmatic. I review my credit card statement on a monthly basis and kind of go, how are we looking? Is this all stuff that made sense for me to buy?

It feels gross to ask parents for money at this age

Neither of my brothers nor I have at any point asked my parents for a notable sum of money, and at no point have our parents given us a notable sum of money. Personally — and not knocking anyone else — that would feel kind of gross and pathetic. (Instead, I have the much more noble position of having inherited from my grandparents.)

There are different ways to approach being born into wealth. On one hand, you get kids like me who were kind of ashamed of it and downplayed it. The criticism here is there's some dishonesty, like I'm misrepresenting a huge thing about me if I'm not talking about it and letting people know.

I don't really see it as dishonest, though, because people are multifaceted and much more complex than the sum of where they grew up. Admittedly, it sometimes sickens me to know I fall into the trust-fund artist stereotype, but I value authenticity a lot — I just do my best to be authentically myself in my interactions with people.

The other camp of hyper-wealthy children are the ones who've never had any shame about it and whose parents were a lot more open with giving them money. They'll flaunt the money and ask their parents for a Range Rover as a grown-ass adult.

I don't like that approach as much. I think it's better to establish yourself and try to be your own person independent of the money.

People who have a lot of money can still be unhappy

As we're all older now, our family has started talking more proactively and intentionally about money.

We've talked about what our wills might consist of, what happens to the Clippers — which my dad owns — once my parents have passed, how having the money affects what we choose to do career-wise, how the money has or has not "corrupted" us, and the wariness we all have around money's general ability to do that to people.

Obviously, money can do a lot for a person. Growing up with a comfortable life (and being around people who had comfortable lives), I both experienced for myself and observed in others the fact that you can very much still be unhappy while having a lot of money.

I know I could have some nicer things, but I try to be aware of hedonic adaptation — I know I'd eventually adapt to those lifestyle choices as a new baseline and possibly go down a slippery slope of a more opulent life, which ultimately leads nowhere.

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