The 10th richest person in the world, Steve Ballmer likes his nonpartisan method of civic engagement better than cutting checks for particular candidates.

Plenty of billionaires put money into politics, and they all pick a team when they do so. George Soros, Tom Steyer and Reid Hoffman all don blue caps before cutting checks to liberal super PACs, while Charles Koch, the Walton siblings and Elon Musk, the world's richest man, are all lined up behind Republicans. The exception who proves the rule, though, may be Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO who thinks he can make a mark on politics by combating misinformation—in a strictly nonpartisan way—to help voters sift fact from fiction.

“James Madison said that a popular government, without information or the ability to go get it, is a prelude to a farce or a tragedy or both,” Ballmer told Forbes this week, paraphrasing the fourth U.S. president. “Come on! It is the government’s job from the start to provide data to the populace.” But after he stepped down from leading Microsoft in 2014—and his wife, Connie, pushed him to get more involved in philanthropic work—Ballmer, whose $123 billion estimated net worth makes him the tenth richest person in the world, found the government data woefully lacking.

So, in 2017, he founded USAFacts, a nonpartisan civic initiative that collects, cleans up, and publishes reams of official data about everything from the economy and education to crime and immigration. It started with the goal of producing an annual “Government 10-K,” modeled after the documents that public companies must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For seven years, Ballmer has personally funded the project. This election year, he confirms he is spending over $40 million to get the facts........

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