What if you bought Intuit in 2000?
US Tech · Software. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play36.1× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Intuit at the start of 2000 would be worth about $36,111 today — 36.1 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook to sell personal finance software, and its products Quicken, TurboTax and QuickBooks became staples for households, tax filers and small businesses. Accounting and tax software is hard to leave: changing it means re-entering years of records and learning new habits. That stickiness made Intuit's earnings unusually durable, though the shares still drifted for much of the 2000s.
The move online made the business better. TurboTax and QuickBooks shifted to cloud subscriptions, and Intuit bought budgeting app Mint in 2009 (shutting it down in 2024), credit platform Credit Karma in 2020 and email marketing firm Mailchimp in 2021. For years it also lobbied against the US government offering a free tax filing tool of its own, and in 2024 the Federal Trade Commission ruled that TurboTax's 'free' advertising was deceptive. The IRS piloted its own Direct File service, which was later dropped. From 2010 to 2026 the stock still rose more than tenfold, despite a steep sell-off in software shares in 2026.
The lesson: Switching costs are a quiet moat; Intuit's customers stayed less because they loved the product than because leaving was a hassle every April.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $18.00 | $36,111 | $4,626 | 36.1× |
| 2003 | $24.00 | $27,083 | $7,727 | 27.1× |
| 2005 | $44.00 | $14,773 | $5,763 | 14.8× |
| 2007 | $31.00 | $20,968 | $4,789 | 21.0× |
| 2008 | $32.00 | $20,312 | $4,626 | 20.3× |
| 2010 | $31.00 | $20,968 | $6,071 | 21.0× |
| 2012 | $53.00 | $12,264 | $5,312 | 12.3× |
| 2015 | $92.00 | $7,065 | $3,301 | 7.1× |
| 2018 | $158 | $4,114 | $2,519 | 4.1× |
| 2020 | $262 | $2,481 | $2,092 | 2.5× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2000, turning $1,000 into $36,111. The S&P 500 from that same year: $4,626.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Intuit is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in US Tech
- What if you bought Apple?
- What if you bought Microsoft?
- What if you bought Amazon?
- What if you bought Nvidia?
- What if you bought Google / Alphabet?
- What if you bought Facebook / Meta?