Yes they did receive government funding from early on. Apple received early stage funding from the SBIC programme: http://www.sbia.org/?page=sbic_program_histo

Yes they did receive government funding from early on. Apple received early stage funding from the SBIC programme: http://www.sbia.org/?page=sbic_program_history http://www.sbia.org/?page=sbic_program_history And, more importantly, many of the technologies used by Apple right from the first computers to the iphones were developed with government funding and used free of charge: http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2013/10/24/t-iphone-government-funding-technology-research-apple-google.cnnmoney/ http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2013/10/24/t-iphone-go... And I am not even talking about the later government subsidies from American states and from Ireland in the form of massive tax breaks. Nokia didn't get away with paying a 2 percent tax on its European profits (but probably received other government funding themselves along the way). Similarly, the Google founders' work on the pagerank algorithms on Stanford was funded by a government entity, the National Science Foundation, and they were allowed to use it commercially free of charge. And Google too, has received massive tax breaks.