Microsoft went public
On this day · 13 March 1986
Microsoft's stock hit the market at $21 a share, raised $61 million in a day, and quietly minted a generation of millionaires.
On March 13, 1986, Microsoft began trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange, nearly eleven years after Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded it. Shares were offered at $21, climbed to roughly $28 by the close of the first day, and the offering raised about $61 million.
The company hadn’t been desperate for cash; Gates reportedly preferred to stay private. But an expansive employee stock-option program had pushed Microsoft toward 500 private shareholders, the threshold that forces a company to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Going public was, in effect, inevitable.
The day made Gates—who held about 45% of the stock—a paper billionaire-in-waiting before he turned 31.
The IPO was hailed as the offering of the year and helped cement Wall Street’s appetite for software companies. Far beyond Redmond, it turned early employees holding options into a new and unusually large class of tech millionaires.
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