MacWorld Boston 2007

I was watching old MacWorld YouTube video's the other day and came across the one where Steve Jobs announced the partnership with Microsoft. I never heard an Apple focused audience boo so loud when Steve mentioned Internet Explorer would be the default browser on all new Macs but give credit to the master presenter as he instantly turns it around with a simple one liner, "and because we believe in choice...".

Part of the deal was that Microsoft was going to purchase 150 million dollars worth of non-voting Apple stock. Now the Microsoft press release (nor the Apple one) never mentioned exactly how many shares that was, but looking at the price of Apple stock back in Jan 1997, I estimated it cost around $5.4375 per share. Divide that by 150 million and you get 27,586,206 shares.

Also part of the same deal was that Microsoft couldn't sell these shares for at least 3 years. Now I don't know when (or if) they ever sold these shares after the vestment period but if they happened to have held them until now the total value would be worth $6,199,999,798.50 (at today's price of $224.75) a share. Now subtract the initial 150 million dollar investment it would still leave them with a tidy profit of $6,172,413,592.50. Yes, that's slightly over 6 billion with a "B". How's that for a killer deal!