3 ms·

I don't know that the full numbers are well known, but this Ars article reveals some of the details: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/apples-stock

I don't know that the full numbers are well known, but this Ars article reveals some of the details: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/apples-stock-rise-could-have-meant-5-billion-for-microsoft.ars http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/apples-stock-r... FTA: All told, Microsoft spent a little over $151 million to acquire 18.2 million shares of Apple stock, for roughly $8.31 per share. Microsoft confirmed that it sold all of its AAPL holdings some time ago, and likely did so at a healthy profit—after all, AAPL has traded significantly higher than $8 for many years. But what if Microsoft had held on to that investment just a little longer?

ajross 15y ago
They would have made a little under 1.2 [edit: 9.7, typod math] billion dollars if they still held the investment today. Which would increase their cash and short term investment reserves by about 2% [edit: 10%]. Microsoft is printing money. Cash is not what they need or care about.
- bcrescimanno 15y ago
  [Edit: math was corrected above] I'm not following your math, 18.2 million shares of Apple today would be worth about $9.8 billion--for a $151 million investment. I'm sure there are nuances that I don't fully grasp; but that's a huge discrepancy. FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that MS should have held onto that investment; I was only answering the question about the purely financial ROI.
- philwelch 15y ago
  On the other hand, the ROI on investing into Apple might compare favorably to a lot of their actual business moves since 1997.