4 April 1975: Microsoft is founded in Albuquerque
Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, a hobbyist computer sold as a kit. Gates was 19 and soon left Harvard. The company's real genius came later: licensing software instead of selling hardware, so every PC maker became a customer. A two-man shop in New Mexico grew into one of the most valuable companies on earth.
The lesson: Owning the standard that everyone else must use can be worth more than building the machine itself.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Microsoft at the start of 1990 → $800,000 today, vs $19,429 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 1990, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 800.0 times the money, and $780,571 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Microsoft teaches: A great business bought at a silly price can still deliver a lost decade; Microsoft's profits grew for years while its 2000 valuation slowly deflated.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $0.6 | $800,000 | $19,429 |
| 1995 | $3.00 | $160,000 | $14,783 |
| 2000 | $40.00 | $12,000 | $4,626 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Microsoft? Every starting year and the full story →
More Microsoft history
- 30 January 2007: Windows Vista launches to consumers
- 13 March 1986: Microsoft goes public
- 25 April 2019: Microsoft reaches a $1 trillion market value
- 27 June 2008: Bill Gates' last day as a full-time Microsoft employee
- 4 July 1996: Hotmail declares independence from your ISP
- 12 July 2006: EU fines Microsoft for dragging its feet
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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