Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 investment in Apple

Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ... by bcrescimanno on Friday March 02, 2012 @01:52PM (#3657793)

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-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?

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Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ... by ajross on Friday March 02, 2012 @01:56PM (#3657810)

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.

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Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ... by bcrescimanno on Friday March 02, 2012 @02:06PM (#3657859)

[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.

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Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ... by philwelch on Friday March 02, 2012 @05:06PM (#3658600)

On the other hand, the ROI on investing into Apple might compare favorably to a lot of their actual business moves since 1997.

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