Why billionaire Steve Ballmer spent $10 million to build a free — and strangely patriotic — website

Asa Mathat / Vox Media

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

It’s been said we’re living in a post-fact, post-truth world, where people choose to ignore facts or believe lies that challenge their own worldview.

Steve Ballmer, the billionaire former CEO of Microsoft and current NBA Clippers team owner, isn’t buying it.

That’s why he wrote $10 million worth of personal checks to create a free website called USAFacts.org, he told Business Insider. 

The site takes government data from 70 different government sources to create a financial report on the government. It makes it easy to find out everything, from how much taxes we all really pay to crime and divorce rates.

Ballmer says the idea for the site has nothing to do with one political party or another, but everything to do with state of politics in general.

“It’s not a political site, but I hope it plays a role,” he told Business Insider. “I am partisan for facts themselves.”

He says today’s political environment feels like a sports event, where everyone is rooting for their own team and against the other team — and that’s inherently dangerous.

“A sports game is easy. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and that’s OK. But that’s not how it should be in this country,” he says. “In politics, unlike sports, everybody needs to arrive at a common conclusion and we all live with the conclusion.”

In other words, the same laws govern us all, no matter which team championed it. And there’s a reason to hope that Ballmer is onto to something and people still do care deeply about facts, even if we all have different opinions about what to do about them.

When the site officially launched in April, Ballmer didn’t know what the response would be, if anyone would care. But the day it launched, the site was so overwhelmed with traffic that the traffic crashed the site for hours. In its first 48 hours, USAFacts.org chalked up more than half a million visitors and 2 million page views. He even got fan letters from people with suggestions on how to better calculate divorce rates or from those who found some typos. 

Some of the stuff the site has discovered about America is downright fascinating. Take a look:

USAFacts is surprisingly patriotic because it begins with the Preamble to the Constitution. It reminds us that we’re all in the country together. The Preamble is treated as the government’s four mission statements. The site then delves into how each mission is doing.

One area Ballmer finds personally fascinating is where the government gets its revenue. In 2014, the latest year that data was available, the government brought in $5.2 trillion. For all the talk about corporate tax rates, it only accounts for 7% of that. Most revenue, 33%, comes from individual taxes.

The country spends more than it makes — and the mission of “securing blessings” takes the biggest chunk. This includes education (14% of the total US budget), Medicare (9%), Social Security (16%) and interest payments on our debt (6%). In comparison, we spend 11% on defense.

The site reveals all kinds of other facts about living in America. For instance, It’s true that we seem to love guns, at least based on how many of them we make. In 2000, the US manufactured 3.8 million guns.

In 2014, that number was way up, to 9 million guns, up 131%. Gun deaths increased in that time, too, from 28,633 in 2000 to 33,599 in 2014, up 17%.

Despite skyrocketing costs, more people are enrolling in college. In 2000, 15.3 million compared to 20.3 million in 2013 …

… with graduation rates remaining steady at about 60%.

Despite the popular idea that people don’t want to get married anymore, there are actually more married couples in the US.

But there are more divorced people, too.

And the family dinner seems to be disappearing, too. In the early 2000s, more than 86% of us ate dinner with family at least once a week. In 2011, that dropped to 73%.

Read more stories on Business Insider, Malaysian edition of the world’s fastest-growing business and technology news website.

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