Business Insider
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: