Steve Ballmer's New Life With the Clippers

Last December, Steve Ballmer found himself in a highly unusual situation: He had time on his hands. It was disconcerting. He was the chief executive of Microsoft, waiting for the company’s board to name a successor, and he didn’t want to take on anything major that would get in the new guy’s way. So he stayed home and binge-watched TV. He plowed through 100 episodes of The Good Wife in about two weeks. “My kids teased me about it mercilessly,” he says. “They said, ‘Dad, how’s the wife?’ ” He watched mostly in bed—on a Microsoft Surface, of course—and says he wasn’t depressed. “ ‘Depressed’ makes it sound like something bad. It was more like, ‘Wow, this is weird. I have nothing to worry about right this minute.’ ”

He’s saying this in October, while sitting in a tiny office at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches classes a couple of days a week. The funk is long gone. Dressed in khakis and a bright green polo shirt, he’s pacing around, gesticulating emphatically, poking me in the shoulder—hard—as he talks about life after Microsoft.