For decades, Bill Gates has been synonymous with Microsoft. But for the first time in history, Gates is no longer the largest individual shareholder of the Redmond-based corporation. In SEC filings released Friday, Gates disclosed that he recently sold 4.6 million Microsoft shares, bringing his share total down to 330 million. That is three million less than Steve Ballmer, Gates’ Harvard friend who served as Microsoft CEO from 2000-2014.

“It’s not an event in and of itself, but it is symbolic in that it speaks to what has taken place at Microsoft over the last 10 years,” Daniel Ives, a New York-based analyst at FBR Capital Markets & Co., told Bloomberg. “There’s been a passing of the guard.”

But this passing is not  unexpected.

“At his 10-year pace of selling stock, Gates will hand over the shareholding crown to Ballmer before mid-2014,” said ComputerWorld’s Gregg Keizer back in January. “Gates will have exhausted his holdings by September 2018 unless he stops or slows his selling.”

In the past five years, Gates has sold more than 402 million Microsoft shares for roughly $11.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Ballmer joined Microsoft in 1980 as the company’s 30th employee, when Gates persuaded him to drop out of Stanford University’s business school. Announcing his retirement plan last August, Ballmer wrote in an email to employees, “I cherish my Microsoft ownership, and look forward to continuing as one of Microsoft’s largest owners.”

Even after this latest stock sale, Gates remains the richest man in the world, according to Bloomberg’s ranking, with a $79.9 billion fortune.