Former Microsoft CEO and the new owner of the Los Angeles Clippers Steve Ballmer vowed to ban all Apple products from his newly-acquired team.
Ballmer, who served on the board of Microsoft, and was the company’s CEO between 2000 and 2014 (leaving his post in February of this year), revealed the news in an interview with Reuters on Thursday:
And [Clippers Coach] Doc [Rivers] kind of knows that’s a project. It’s one of the first things he said to me: ‘We are probably going to get rid of these iPads, aren’t we?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we probably are.’ But I promised we would do it during the off season.
Ballmer is still the largest individual shareholder of Microsoft, with approximately 4% of the company which is estimated at close to $15.7 billion, Reuters reported.
It should come as no surprise then that the Microsoft loyalist, who has reportedly also banned his own family from using Apple’s iPhones, would push to make the Clippers a Microsoft organization and team: “Most of the Clippers are on Windows, some of the players and coaches are not,” Ballmer said.
Ballmer officially acquired the Clippers on August 12 of this year after placing a $2 billion bid on the team in May.
Questions have been swirling as to whether Ballmer will ban other products, such as Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, which were acquired by Apple in May of this year as part of a $3 billion deal.
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