But Ballmer did not just excell as a leader in his extracurriculur activities, he was considered a shining academic.

In high school, Ballmer scored a 1600 on his SATs and was a National Merit Scholar.

As a college sophomore, Ballmer finished in the top 100 in the prestigious Putnam national math competition, and ended up graduating magna cum laude in applied math and economics.

Yet despite his achievements, Ballmer did not appear to work excessively.

Stephen Manse, a Forbes columnist who co-wrote a biography of Gates, recounts how Ballmer took a challenging graduate-level microeconomics course—Economics 250—with Gates.

The two friends barely attended any of the lectures and embarked on an intense one-week, late-night study program where Ballmer would have characteristic mood-swings, vascillating regularly from screams of “we’re golden” to “no, we’re not.”

Manse writes that when the one-page final examination was handed out, Ballmer realized that it was mostly theoretical and mathematical—areas in which he excelled naturally. Ballmer earned the second highest grade in the course while Gates earned the highest grade.

But Gates, still in competition with his old friend, gibes that Ballmer needed to sweat out the grades that he could achieve through genius alone.

“He went to all his classes,” writes Gates in an e-mail message. “I, [on the other hand], was studiously uninvolved and didn’t go to all my classes.”

Trial and Error

After leaving Harvard, Ballmer was accepted to Stanford Business School (SBS) but deferred for a year to work at Procter & Gamble as an assistant product manager, marketing such products as Coldsnap Freezer Dessert Maker and Moist ‘n’ Easy Snack Cake.

But Ballmer was still not yet ready to settle down to business school and headed to Los Angeles to try his luck in the movie industry.

In atypical fashion, Ballmer did not manage to break in, ending up reading B-movie scripts for NBC and parking cars at charity auctions.