Bill Gates on IPO and Capital Markets

The 1986 initial public offering, opening at $21 and closing near $28, created extraordinary wealth inside Microsoft: the subsequent rise of the stock made an estimated four billionaires and twelve thousand millionaires of the company's employees, with Gates's retained 44.9 percent stake anchoring his decades atop the wealth rankings. The company Steve Ballmer inherited as chief executive in 2000 and handed to Satya Nadella on February 4, 2014, kept compounding. Microsoft became the third United States public company to be valued at over one trillion dollars in April 2019, and pandemic-era demand pushed its valuation toward two trillion as cloud computing carried earnings. Both Standard & Poor's and Moody's have awarded the company a AAA credit rating, a distinction its assets and low borrowing costs long supported, and it overtook ExxonMobil in November 2014 to become the second most valuable public company behind Apple.

Through the mid-1980s Microsoft scaled from scrappy to dominant. SoftLetter reported the company, with an estimated $55 million in 1983 sales, as the world's second-largest microcomputer software company; InfoWorld called it the industry's most influential firm, with some insiders saying it aimed to be the IBM of software, and more than ninety percent of the fifteen million Americans using a PC at work ran MS-DOS. On February 16, 1986, Microsoft moved to a corporate campus in Redmond, and on March 13, 1986, it went public on the Nasdaq at $21.00 per share, raising $61 million as the price ended the day at $28.00. By 1987 it was the largest personal-computer software producer, having passed Lotus, and its July 1987 purchase of Forethought, the developer of PowerPoint, marked its first major acquisition. Cytation, picked up in January 1986, had already formed the company's CD-ROM division months before the offering.

When Microsoft went public in 1986, Gates retained 44.9 percent of the company, and the following year Forbes listed him as a billionaire with $1.25 billion, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at thirty-one. He held the top spot on the Forbes 400 from 1993 through 2007 and again later, and Jeff Bezos finally displaced him as the world's richest person in October 2017, with Gates briefly regaining the position in November 2019 after a surge in Microsoft shares. He has described himself as having paid more tax than any individual, over six billion dollars, gladly, and advocates higher taxes particularly for the wealthy. His fortune also funded an unusual collector's streak, including the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci's scientific writings, bought at auction in 1994 for $30.8 million, and a Medina estate nicknamed Xanadu 2.0. He has since announced his intention to give away virtually all of his fortune over time and move off the world's-richest lists.