The front page On This Day in 1997. Microsoft buys a $150 million share of financially troubled Apple.
The only #tech investment #Microsoft ever made which returned a profit:
Top 4 Microsoft Acquisitions That Failed:
Nokia: Acquired: Apr 25, 2014; Price: $7.4 billion
Hotmail: $500 million acquisition in 1997.
aQuantive: Acquired May 18, 2007 for $6.2 billion.
Skype: May 2011, acquisition $8.5 billion.
Nokia: $7.5 billion acquisition in 2014.
I vividly remember this. Microsoft wanted to keep Apple alive so they wouldn’t face a monopoly ruling like AT&T did. Does Microsoft still have this profitable Apple stock or did they sell it off?
in 2002, it started selling its Apple stock again, and got rid of its entire stake by the middle of 2003. In total, it netted Microsoft around $550 million. That’s a healthy 260% gain in just six years.
Microsoft held approximately 18.1 million shares in Apple at the time it started selling them. Since then, multiple stock splits have taken place: one on a 2-for-1 basis on February 28, 2005, and one on a 7-for-1 basis on June 9, 2014. This means those 18.1 million shares would have been 253.4 million shares as of today. Multiply that by the current stock price of $503,43, and the result is a whopping $127.5 billion stake. That’s 5.9% of Apple’s total value, a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion.
Microsoft’s $150 million would’ve been worth 850 times more today.
25 years later it would have been worth at best estimate it is $118,107,142,857 based on a share price of $0.21 on August 15, 1997.
