Who owns Microsoft? No single person does. The largest holders are two index fund managers, Vanguard and BlackRock, and they are the only owners above five percent that Microsoft itself names in its October 2026 proxy statement. Everything else you have read about Gates and Ballmer runs on numbers filed in 2014 and 2019. Rechecked against SEC filings on October 23, 2026.
Who owns Microsoft? The short answer
Microsoft's only shareholders above five percent are Vanguard and BlackRock, according to its October 2026 proxy statement. The rest of the company sits with thousands of smaller funds, retail investors, and a handful of former executives who stopped reporting their stakes years ago. That last part matters more than any table you will see today, because most of the ownership figures circulating online have no date attached.
What the primary documents actually say, with the date each number was filed. Every row below comes from a specific SEC document, not from an aggregator.
Who Microsoft's filings name as owners, and when each number was filed
Microsoft proxy (DEF 14A) filed Oct 21, 2026, Vanguard Group 13G/A filed Mar 27, 2026, Vanguard Capital Management 13G filed Apr 30, 2026, Ballmer Form 4 filed Aug 20, 2014, Microsoft proxy filed Oct 16, 2019. All on SEC EDGAR, checked Oct 23, 2026
| Holder | Shares | Stake | Document behind the number | When it was filed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanguard Capital Management LLC | 555,988,240 | 7.48% | Schedule 13G filed Apr 30, 2026, quoted in Microsoft's Oct 21, 2026 proxy | Filed in 2026 - The proxy lists this Vanguard subsidiary, not The Vanguard Group, Inc. Its 13G reports sole voting power over 73,430,154 shares and sole dispositive power over 555,988,240. |
| The Vanguard Group, Inc. | 0 | 0% | Schedule 13G/A filed Mar 27, 2026 | Filed in 2026 - The filing gives the reason in its own words: "On January 12, 2026, The Vanguard Group, Inc. went through an internal realignment." This is the name most ranking pages still print next to 8 to 9 percent. |
| BlackRock, Inc. | 540,020,228 | 7.30% | Schedule 13G/A filed Feb 13, 2024, quoted in Microsoft's Oct 21, 2026 proxy | Filed in 2024 - Microsoft's 2026 proxy says this line is "based on a Schedule 13G/A filed with the SEC on February 13, 2024": thirty-two months before the proxy itself. |
| Steve Ballmer | 333,254,734 | about 4.5% | His last Form 4, filed Aug 20, 2014 | Filed before 2020 - No ownership filing on Microsoft under his name since. The percentage is our division of that 2014 count by the 7,426,426,719 shares outstanding on Sep 30, 2026 (4.49%), no filing states it. |
| Bill Gates | 102,992,934 | 1.34% | Microsoft proxy filed Oct 16, 2019 | Filed before 2020 - 1.34% is the figure that 2019 proxy printed. He left the board on March 13, 2020, and nothing under his name about Microsoft has been filed since. Microsoft's 2026 proxy does not mention him. |
| Satya Nadella | 918,226 | about 0.012% | Microsoft proxy filed Oct 21, 2026 (as of Sep 30, 2026) | Filed in 2026 - His most recent Form 4s were filed on September 1 and 2, 2026. |
| All 18 directors and executive officers | 2,139,607 | about 0.03% | Microsoft proxy filed Oct 21, 2026 (as of Sep 30, 2026) | Filed in 2026 - 2,139,607 of 7,426,426,719 shares is 0.029%. Every row in the proxy's insider table carries the footnote "Less than 1%". |
Two rows carry the real story. Ballmer's percentage is our division of his 2014 count by the 7,426,426,719 shares outstanding on September 30, 2026, the record date in Microsoft's latest proxy, Gates's 1.34 percent is the figure his 2019 proxy printed. Their share counts are the last ones either man ever filed. Neither has been required to disclose anything since, and neither has. Keep that in mind every time a page tells you what they own "now."
The one document where Microsoft names its owners
Once a year, Microsoft files a proxy statement, a document called DEF 14A that invites shareholders to the annual meeting and, along the way, lists everyone who beneficially owns more than five percent of the stock. The current one was filed on October 21, 2026, for the meeting on December 8, 2026. It is the freshest document in which Microsoft itself says who owns it, and its ownership table contains exactly two names.
The table's own words: "This table lists all entities that are the beneficial owner of more than 5% of Microsoft common stock." Vanguard Capital Management LLC, 555,988,240 shares, 7.48 percent. BlackRock, 540,020,228 shares, 7.30 percent. That is the complete list. State Street, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price, fixtures of every "top shareholders" article, are absent, because none of them clears the five percent bar that triggers a mention.
Two terms carry this whole subject and deserve one plain definition each. "Beneficial ownership" means having the power to vote or sell a share, whoever technically holds it, it is the SEC's way of asking who actually controls the stock rather than whose name sits on a certificate. And a proxy statement is written for shareholders about to vote, which is why it is the one place a company must tally, in one table, everyone whose stake could sway that vote. Companies file plenty of documents about money. The proxy is the one about power.
The same proxy also discloses what the people inside the building hold, and the numbers deserve more attention than they get. Satya Nadella: 918,226 shares. CFO Amy Hood: 459,226. Vice Chair Brad Smith: 372,454. Board members mostly hold four and five figure counts, with two directors, John Collison and Catherine MacGregor, at exactly zero. The group line reads "Directors and Executive Officers as a Group (18 people): 2,139,607," and every single row carries the same footnote symbol, an asterisk meaning "less than 1%." The eighteen people running one of the largest companies on earth together hold about three ten-thousandths of it.
Now read the footnotes nobody quotes. BlackRock's line is, in the proxy's own words, "based on a Schedule 13G/A filed with the SEC on February 13, 2024." The table is labeled "as of 09/30/2026," but that numerator comes from a filing made thirty-two months before the proxy itself. A 13G amendment is required only when a passive holder's position crosses certain thresholds, so Microsoft carries the last one forward. Vanguard's line changed this year for a different reason. The Vanguard Group, Inc., the name nearly every ranking page prints, filed a Schedule 13G/A on March 27, 2026 reporting zero Microsoft shares, explaining that "On January 12, 2026, The Vanguard Group, Inc. went through an internal realignment." Its subsidiary Vanguard Capital Management LLC filed its own Schedule 13G on April 30, 2026, for 555,988,240 shares, and that is the filing the new proxy quotes. So the company's official answer to "who owns Microsoft" mixes a 2026 filing with one from early 2024.
Microsoft's October 2026 proxy still sources BlackRock's stake to a filing from February 2024.
This is not sloppiness on Microsoft's part. It is how the disclosure system works, and it means the question "who owns Microsoft" has no single up-to-the-minute answer anywhere, including at Microsoft. What exists is a set of documents with dates, and the honest move is to read them with the dates attached. This habit predates 2025: the 2019 proxy sourced its Vanguard line to a 13G/A from February 2019 the same way.
The institutional layer, and why no two sites agree on it
Index funds hold Microsoft because it sits at or near the top of nearly every major index, and the money tracking those indexes has to hold it in proportion. Vanguard and BlackRock manage that money for tens of millions of fund investors. Neither firm picked Microsoft the way a stock picker would, and neither can dump it while their clients hold index funds. Their stakes mirror how much index money exists, and that keeps growing.
Quarterly, big managers file a Form 13F listing their US-listed holdings. One grounding note before the numbers: a 13F shows long positions in US-listed securities held by that specific filing entity, about 45 days after the quarter ends. It is the freshest public trace of institutional ownership, and also the reason the field disagrees with itself, because "that specific filing entity" stopped meaning what it used to.
Know what a 13F leaves out, too. It skips options and swaps, holdings in non-US vehicles, and anything sold after the quarter closed but before the filing landed. So even a fresh 13F describes a position that is at least six weeks old on the day you read it, held by one legal entity among possibly several. It is the best public instrument we have, and it still photographs only the past. Any page converting a 13F share count into a confident present-tense percentage has already made two silent assumptions on your behalf.
Whose money is that, really? When a page says "institutions own Microsoft," it is describing plumbing, not a cabal. Vanguard's stake is the pooled savings of people holding its index funds, BlackRock's iShares ETFs work the same way. The end owners are retirement accounts, pension plans, and ordinary brokerage customers, sliced into fund shares. This is also why the popular "institutional ownership" percentage swings so wildly across the field, from about 71 percent on one broker page to 81.55 on a tracker that cites GuruFocus: there is no single agreed definition of which holders to count as institutions, which entities to consolidate, and which quarter to freeze. The number is an editorial choice presented as a measurement.
Compare what pages ranking for this query print for one holder, Vanguard, as of October 23, 2026: 8.6 percent in the Microsoft forum answer that Google's AI Overview quotes, 8.7 on TMGM, 8.95 on an AI-funding tracker that copied last year's proxy, 9.44 on Investopedia, 9.49 on Capital.com, and 7.48 in Microsoft's own new proxy. Six values for one owner, and the newest filing behind any of them carries the smallest number. Part of that spread is timing. The rest happened quietly in 2026: Vanguard restructured how it files. After the realignment of January 12, 2026, The Vanguard Group, Inc. reported zero Microsoft shares on a 13G/A, a subsidiary filed a new 13G for 555,988,240, and in May and August 2026 the group filed 13F notices instead of full holdings reports, meaning other Vanguard entities now report its holdings. Aggregators that track one entity now print a fraction of the group total and call it "Vanguard." BlackRock's consolidated filer changed the same way: the entity that filed its reports through 2024 now sits under the name BlackRock Finance, Inc., with its last consolidated report covering mid-2024.
So when one aggregator prints 6.5 percent for a single Vanguard entity and a broker page says 9.4, both may be faithfully reading a real filing. They are just reading different slices of a company that no longer files as one piece, summing the separate Vanguard entities on the Q1 2026 aggregator data lands near 9.3 percent, a figure we pass along only with that warning attached. The practical takeaway for your own research: check which legal entity a number belongs to and what quarter it covers, before comparing it with anything.
Vanguard's stake, six ways
Ranking pages and MSFT proxy, checked Oct 23, 2026
| Quarter / item | Vanguard stake as printed |
|---|---|
| MSFT proxy 2026 | 7.48 |
| MS forum (AIO) | 8.6 |
| TMGM | 8.7 |
| AI-funding site | 8.95 |
| Investopedia | 9.44 |
| Capital.com | 9.49 |
Who owns the most shares of Microsoft?
Vanguard holds the most Microsoft shares of any single owner: Microsoft's latest proxy, filed October 21, 2026, lists Vanguard Capital Management LLC at 555,988,240 shares or 7.48 percent, just ahead of BlackRock at 7.30. Among individuals, the last filed numbers put Steve Ballmer first at 333,254,734 shares, though that figure was filed in 2014 and nothing newer exists. No individual has ever appeared in the modern proxy's five percent table.
Sit for a second with how small the insiders' slice is. All eighteen of Microsoft's current directors and executive officers combined hold 2,139,607 shares, about 0.03 percent of the company. Popular data pages claim insiders own about 6 percent of Microsoft, WallStreetZen puts it at 6.25. That figure works only if you count Ballmer and Gates as insiders, which the SEC stopped doing when they left their board and officer roles, and if you use their 2014 and 2019 share counts as if they were current. The people who actually run Microsoft today own, collectively, a rounding error.
Does Bill Gates own Microsoft?
Bill Gates does not own Microsoft, and he has not run it for years. He last disclosed a stake in October 2019: 102,992,934 shares, 1.34 percent, in that year's proxy statement. He stepped down from the board on March 13, 2020, which Microsoft announced under the headline "Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates Steps Down from Board of Directors," and with that his obligation to report trades ended. Whatever he holds personally today is private information.
The confusion is understandable. He co-founded the company, held about 45 percent at the 1986 IPO by widely cited accounts, and spent three decades as its public face. But he has been giving shares away since the 1990s, mostly to the foundation that carries his name, and each ranking page models what remains differently. That is why you will find his "current" stake printed as 0.53 percent, 0.9, 1.34, and 1.39 on different pages of the same search results, none of them dated to a filing. The only dated number is the 2019 one.
A category error also hides inside "Gates's Microsoft wealth." His fortune has been managed for decades through Cascade Investment, a private office that spread it across railways, hotels, farmland, and dozens of listed companies. Forum threads asking how Gates keeps getting richer while selling Microsoft are asking about that machine, not about MSFT. By the time he left the board, Microsoft stock was one line in a much larger portfolio, which is exactly why his personal stake could quietly stop being public without anyone noticing for years.
The quiet exit: the foundation's last Microsoft share
Here is the part no ranking page has caught. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, the entity that invests the foundation's endowment and files a public 13F every quarter, reported zero Microsoft shares as of June 30, 2026. Not a reduced position. Zero, for the second quarter in a row.
The trust's own filings trace the exit. It held 28,957,247 Microsoft shares at the end of September 2024. A year later, after two heavy quarters of selling, the count was 9,191,207. By December 31, 2025 it stood at 7,691,207, worth about 3.7 billion dollars. Then the position vanishes: the report for March 31, 2026 lists no Microsoft at all, and the latest one, filed August 14, 2026 for the quarter ended June 30, lists 24 holdings, from Berkshire Hathaway to FedEx, with Microsoft on none of the lines.
The Gates Foundation Trust's Microsoft position, quarter by quarter
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, Forms 13F-HR (CIK 0001166559), quarters ended Sep 30, 2024 to Jun 30, 2026, last filed Aug 14, 2026
| Quarter end | Microsoft shares held | Reported value | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 30, 2024 | 28,957,247 | $12.46 billion | Large position - The starting point of this series: 28,957,247 shares. |
| Dec 31, 2024 | 28,457,247 | $11.99 billion | Large position - 500,000 fewer shares than the quarter before. |
| Mar 31, 2025 | 28,457,247 | $10.68 billion | Large position - Same share count as December, the lower value reflects Microsoft's share price. |
| Jun 30, 2025 | 26,191,207 | $13.03 billion | Reduced - 2,266,040 fewer shares than the quarter before. |
| Sep 30, 2025 | 9,191,207 | $4.76 billion | Reduced - 17,000,000 fewer shares in one quarter. |
| Dec 31, 2025 | 7,691,207 | $3.72 billion | Reduced - 1,500,000 fewer shares, the last report that lists Microsoft at all. |
| Mar 31, 2026 | 0 | $0 | Zero shares - The report for this quarter lists no Microsoft position. |
| Jun 30, 2026 | 0 | $0 | Zero shares - Filed Aug 14, 2026: 24 holdings, none of them Microsoft. The next report, for Sep 30, 2026, is due by mid-November. |
Source: Gates Foundation Trust Forms 13F-HR. Latest filing checked October 23, 2026. Chart originally made for Meikuio with Meiku Charts.
The mechanics behind the curve are ordinary, and that is exactly what makes the endpoint strange. Gates transfers shares to the foundation as gifts, the trust's investment office then sells them over time to fund grants, a pipeline that has moved tens of billions of dollars over two decades. Positions shrink, that is the design. But a pipeline shrinks toward some working balance, and this one went to zero and stayed there for two consecutive reports. Whether that is a permanent policy or a pause, the next 13F, due in mid-November 2026, will say, until then, zero is the entire public record. A 13F carries no explanations, and no filing obliges the trust to give one, so the why stays private.
Two boundaries keep this honest. A 13F covers only the trust's US-listed long positions, so it says nothing about Gates's personal shares, which stopped being public in 2019. And the trust exiting a stock is an endowment decision, made by its investment office, not a statement from Gates about Microsoft. What the filings do establish is narrower and stranger: the vehicle most people picture when they say "Gates's Microsoft billions" last reported a Microsoft position in the filing that covered December 2025, and both reports since show zero, and the pages ranking for this query still model his wealth as if it were there. The page that came closest, a license-key shop's blog, caught the September 2025 drawdown and then stopped updating before the zero became public in May 2026.
The Ballmer question: the number nobody dates
Steve Ballmer's last Microsoft ownership filing is a Form 4, the report insiders must file whenever their holdings change, filed August 20, 2014. It records a routine acquisition of 827 shares on August 19, bringing his total to 333,254,734. That figure, 333,254,734, is the exact share count WallStreetZen prints today, TMGM rounds it to 333.2 million, and the forum answer Google's AI Overview quotes gives him 4.5 percent, each presented as his current position, usually with a dollar value attached in 2026 prices.
We ran the census. A full-text search of SEC filings for "Ballmer" across ownership forms, Forms 3, 4, 13D and 13G, checked September 3, 2026, returns 34 documents, and the most recent one touching Microsoft is that August 2014 Form 4. A second pass on October 23, 2026 found nothing newer. His only later ownership filing of any kind covers a different company entirely. The reason is mechanical: he left the board in August 2014, ending insider reporting, and a stake below five percent triggers no 13G. A man estimated to hold four and a half percent of a 3.7 trillion dollar company has had no legal reason to tell anyone about it for over a decade, and he hasn't.
Every claim that Ballmer owns 4.5% of Microsoft today is a twelve-year-old number wearing today's date.
The arithmetic of his frozen number is worth thirty seconds, because it shows how precise the staleness is. After his last open-market sale in November 2010, his Form 4 showed 333,252,990 shares. Between 2010 and 2014 he collected small routine grants as a director, 827 shares in that final August 2014 filing alone, which is how the count landed on exactly 333,254,734. The pages printing that figure today are not quoting an estimate that happens to be old. They are quoting a specific twelve-year-old document, down to the last four digits, without naming it.
Be careful with what this does and does not prove. It does not mean Ballmer sold, and it does not mean he still holds every share, he has said publicly over the years that he kept his stock, and Forbes models his wealth on that basis, but a statement to a journalist is not a filing. The precise claim, the one that survives checking, is this: nobody outside Ballmer's family office knows his Microsoft position, and every site quoting 4.48 or 4.49 percent is dividing a twelve-year-old share count by this quarter's share total. The two camps arguing about whether he or Gates is "the largest individual shareholder" are both arguing from stale paper. The last filed numbers put Ballmer ahead, and that is the most anyone can honestly say.
Who founded Microsoft, and where did their shares go?
Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The current proxy opens its shareholder letter with exactly that anniversary: "Fifty years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft with a simple but powerful idea." Gates's path from roughly 45 percent at the 1986 IPO to an undisclosed stake today ran through decades of scheduled selling and donation. Allen's ran out earlier: he stepped back from operations in 1983, his stake fell below the five percent disclosure line around 2000, and after that no filing tracked it. He died on October 15, 2018, and no public document discloses whether his estate still holds Microsoft at all. His affairs passed to his sister Jody Allen as executor, managed through the family office once called Vulcan, later renamed Vale Group. Somewhere in that structure the co-founder's remaining stake, if any survives, sits invisible to the public record, a quarter century after it last crossed a disclosure line.
That is the pattern worth noticing across all three founders' stories, Gates, Allen, and the early-employee generation: American disclosure rules follow roles and thresholds, not fame. The moment someone stops being a director, officer, or five percent holder, their ownership goes dark, no matter how large it once was. The public record of Microsoft's individual owners is a photo album, not a live feed.
The album does have dated pages, and they tell the dilution story cleanly. Roughly 45 percent at the March 13, 1986 IPO. About 24 percent a decade later, per accounts of the mid-1990s proxies. Down through years of pre-announced quarterly selling and foundation gifts to 1.34 percent in the 2019 proxy, the last page with his name on it. Each step is the same move: the company grew, new shares went to employees, and the founder converted paper into a philanthropy pipeline. Fifty years after Albuquerque, the founding stake has effectively left the building.
Who is the CEO of Microsoft, and how much does he own?
Satya Nadella is Microsoft's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He became CEO effective February 4, 2014, and Chairman of the Board in June 2021, both dates from Microsoft's own filings. Per the current proxy he beneficially owned 918,226 shares as of September 30, 2026, which is about 0.012 percent of the company, and fresh Form 4s show him selling scheduled tranches as recently as September 1, 2026. He runs Microsoft because the board employs him to, not because he owns it.
His incentive to care works through pay, not holdings. The proxy notes that over 95 percent of the CEO's annual target compensation is performance-based, most of it in stock awards that vest over years against growth and shareholder-return targets. So Nadella's wealth does track Microsoft's fate, just through a compensation contract the board designed rather than through a founder-sized stake. The regular Form 4 sales that headlines sometimes treat as ominous are the scheduled other half of that machine: awards vest, taxes come due, tranches get sold.
That distinction, control through role rather than ownership, is the actual answer to most versions of this question people type. Nobody who owns a large piece of Microsoft manages it, and nobody who manages it owns a large piece.
Above the CEO sits the board the shareholders elect. The 2026 proxy nominates twelve directors, eleven of them independent, with Sandra Peterson serving as Lead Independent Director, a role that exists precisely because Nadella chairs the board he reports to. Directors stand for election every year, and in an uncontested election a nominee needs more votes for than against. This is the machinery a seven percent shareholder actually touches: not a hotline to the CEO, but a ballot with twelve names on it, once a year, weighted by shares.
Control is votes, and every Microsoft share gets exactly one
Microsoft has one class of common stock, and every share carries exactly one vote. The company's own capital stock description spells it out: holders "are entitled to one vote per share on all matters voted on by the stockholders," with no cumulative voting, and the proxy summarizes it as a "single class of stock with equal voting rights." There are no founder super-shares, no golden share, and the 100 million authorized preferred shares sit unissued. Whoever holds the most stock holds the most votes, and today that is index money voting on behalf of fund investors.
This makes Microsoft almost boring next to the AI companies it funds. OpenAI's structure splits money from control so aggressively that a 26 percent foundation stake appoints the board while a larger investor gets none of it, and Anthropic routes ultimate control through a purpose trust that owns almost no equity. Microsoft is the control group in that experiment: the oldest, plainest answer to "who decides," which is one share, one vote, majority rules. A seven percent index manager can vote seven percent, and its stewardship teams, the departments that cast the funds' votes, mostly follow standard governance policy rather than any agenda, because more than ninety percent of that money passively tracks indexes. Together the two managers named in the proxy vote roughly a seventh of the company: enough to matter in a close proposal, nowhere near enough to run it.
One more mechanism quietly reshapes everyone's percentage: buybacks. Microsoft's board has authorized repeated repurchase programs, 40 billion dollar authorizations in 2016 and 2019, then 60 billion in September 2021 and again in September 2024. In fiscal 2026 the company repurchased roughly 36 million shares while issuing about 29 million in employee equity, so the total count fell from 7,434 million at the start of the year to 7,427 million at its end. When the denominator shrinks, every holder's percentage drifts up without anyone buying a share. Ballmer's frozen 2014 share count, for instance, computes to a slightly higher percentage today than it did the day he filed it.
You can watch the denominator move on the covers of three consecutive filings: 7,433,166,379 shares as of July 24, 2025, then 7,428,434,704 as of April 23, 2026, then 7,425,545,491 as of July 23, 2026. About seven and a half million shares evaporated in a year, at a company that also grants stock to over two hundred thousand employees. The new proxy's record-date count, 7,426,426,719 on September 30, 2026, sits about 880,000 above July's, so the shrink shows up across years rather than in every quarter. That slow shrink is the closest thing Microsoft's ownership has to a plot: fewer shares, the same index money, and percentages that creep upward for everyone left holding.
Insiders: about 6% or 0.03%?
Data pages and MSFT proxy, checked Oct 23, 2026
| Quarter / item | Insider ownership as printed |
|---|---|
| WallStreetZen | 6.25 |
| TMGM | 6 |
| MSFT proxy 2026 | 0.03 |
What Microsoft owns: the flip side of the question
Half the people typing "who owns Microsoft" turn out to be asking the opposite question, judging by the related searches Google shows: who owns Xbox, who owns LinkedIn, who owned GitHub before Microsoft. The census below comes from Microsoft's own deal filings, announced value versus what the accounting later recorded where they differ.
The before-owners answer the nostalgia half of those searches. LinkedIn was an independent public company, co-founded by Reid Hoffman, until Microsoft paid 196 dollars a share for it in 2016, Hoffman sits on Microsoft's board today. GitHub was a venture-backed private company when the 7.5 billion dollar stock deal closed in October 2018. Activision Blizzard, the biggest deal in Microsoft's history and the one that made "who owns Call of Duty" a Microsoft question, traded publicly until the merger took effect on October 13, 2023 after nearly two years of regulatory fighting. All three now sit inside Microsoft's reporting segments as wholly owned pieces of one balance sheet.
What Microsoft owns, and one large thing it does not
Microsoft 10-Q and 10-K filings and deal announcements on SEC EDGAR, OpenAI interest per Microsoft's FY2026 10-K
| Company | Deal closed | Price | Status today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Activision Blizzard (Xbox games) | Oct 13, 2023 | $68.7 billion announced | Owned outright - The merger took effect on October 13, 2023, after nearly two years of regulatory review. |
| Dec 8, 2016 | $26.2 billion, $196 per share | Owned outright - Co-founder Reid Hoffman sits on Microsoft's board. | |
| Nuance (healthcare AI) | Mar 4, 2022 | $18.8 billion purchase price | Owned outright - Announced at $19.7 billion, $18.8 billion is the purchase price Microsoft's filings record. |
| GitHub | Oct 25, 2018 | $7.5 billion in stock | Owned outright - Microsoft's 10-Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2018 gives the closing date as October 25, 2018. |
| ZeniMax / Bethesda | Mar 9, 2021 | $8.1 billion purchase price | Owned outright - Announced at $7.5 billion, Microsoft's 10-Q records a total purchase price of $8.1 billion. |
| Mojang (Minecraft) | Late 2014 | $2.5 billion announced | Owned outright - Announced September 15, 2014. |
| Skype | Oct 13, 2011 | $8.5 billion announced | Retired - Microsoft retired Skype in 2025. |
| OpenAI | Investment, not a purchase | about 25% interest per Microsoft's 10-K | Minority stake - Microsoft's 10-K reports an interest of approximately 25 percent and does not consolidate OpenAI. Per Microsoft's earnings releases, the position swung from a $3.6 billion net loss in fiscal 2025 to a $5 billion net gain in fiscal 2026. |
The OpenAI row answers the single most repeated misconception in forums: Microsoft does not own OpenAI. Its own 10-K describes an interest of approximately 25 percent, an economic share of results that comes with none of the board control ownership usually implies, the full mechanics, and why that percentage moves, live in our breakdown of who owns ChatGPT. The accounting shows how un-subsidiary the relationship is: per Microsoft's own earnings releases, the OpenAI position swung from a 3.6 billion dollar net loss in fiscal 2025 to a 5 billion dollar net gain in fiscal 2026, valuation weather passing through the income statement, which is what happens to investments and never to divisions. That same pricing fog surrounds private AI rounds across the market: see our Perplexity valuation reality check, where four conflicting numbers claim to measure the same one-year-old round. Copilot, by contrast, is Microsoft's own product through and through, built on licensed OpenAI models plus Microsoft's in-house MAI models, which it trains itself.
How Microsoft compares with the rest of Big Tech
Microsoft's plain structure is the exception among its peers, not the rule. Meta and Alphabet both run dual-class structures in which founders hold special high-vote shares, which is why Mark Zuckerberg can control Meta outright while owning a minority of its economics, and why Google's founders kept decisive votes long after selling most of their stake. At Microsoft that instrument simply does not exist. When Gates wanted to reduce his exposure, every share he sold surrendered exactly its share of the vote, and over four decades that arithmetic transferred control from a founder to an index-fund electorate one sale at a time.
Apple sits closest to Microsoft's model: single class, dispersed ownership, the same two index giants at the top of the register. That pattern, where the "owner" of a trillion-dollar company is effectively everyone with a retirement account, is quietly becoming the default state of mature tech. The founder-controlled structure makes headlines, the Microsoft structure holds most of the market's weight.
What the top results get wrong
We read every page ranking on the first page of Google for who owns Microsoft, on September 3 and again on October 23, 2026, and checked their numbers against the filings. The pattern is not that they are careless. It is that almost none of them date anything, and undated ownership numbers rot silently.
The specifics, as of our October 23, 2026 check. One stock data page, WallStreetZen, tells its readers Microsoft is "owned by 0.07% institutional shareholders, 6.25% Microsoft insiders, and 93.68% retail investors," an inverted split that contradicts both every other page and the table printed directly above it. The third organic result, another data aggregator, shows dashes where its institutional percentages should be. A broker's analysis on Capital.com names Bill Gates the largest individual shareholder without printing a single number for him, while TMGM and WallStreetZen crown Ballmer using his 2014 count. Gates's stake runs from 0.53 percent on TMGM to 1.39 on WallStreetZen. The institutional total swings from about 71 to about 82 percent depending on who is counting and what they count. And the answer engines inherit all of it. Google's AI Overview answers this query with "Former CEO Steve Ballmer is the largest individual shareholder (~4.5%)" and puts Vanguard at about 8.6 percent, citing a Microsoft forum reply that announces it was written by "Bing Chat running on ChatGPT4" on January 5, 2024. In September, the same overview cited a Microsoft license-key shop.
Google's AI Overview for who owns Microsoft now cites a 2024 chatbot reply.
What the top results say about Microsoft's owners, and what the filings say
Pages ranking on Google (US) for "who owns microsoft", read Oct 23, 2026, SEC EDGAR filings named in each row
| Claim as printed | Range on the results pages | What the filings say | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vanguard's stake | 8.6% to 9.49% | 7.48% for Vanguard Capital Management LLC in Microsoft's Oct 2026 proxy, The Vanguard Group itself reported zero on Mar 27, 2026 | Partly right - None of the five figures on the results pages matches the holder and number in Microsoft's 2026 proxy, and only Investopedia and Capital.com say what date their number describes. |
| Gates's stake | 0.53% to 1.39%, or "largest individual shareholder" | 1.34% in Microsoft's October 2019 proxy, nothing filed under his name since | Contradicted by filings - The 2019 proxy is the last document that states his stake. Microsoft's 2026 proxy does not mention him. |
| Ballmer's stake | 4.48% to 4.5%, presented as current | 333,254,734 shares on his Aug 20, 2014 Form 4, nothing filed since | Contradicted by filings - The share count is real. Whether he holds it today is not public: he left the board in 2014 and has filed nothing on Microsoft since. |
| "Institutions own" | about 71% to 81.55% | No filing defines one total, it depends on which entities and which quarter are counted | Partly right - TMGM prints about 71%, an AI-funding site cites GuruFocus at 81.55% as of July 10, 2026, and one data aggregator in the top three shows dashes where its institutional figures should be. |
| "Insiders own" | about 6% to 6.25% | 0.03% for all 18 current directors and executive officers (2,139,607 shares), Microsoft's Oct 2026 proxy | Contradicted by filings - The 6% figure works only if Ballmer and Gates are counted as insiders, as WallStreetZen's insider list does, with Ballmer's 2014 share count at the top. |
Credit where due: Investopedia's page, updated January 7, 2026, dates what it prints, Vanguard's 9.44 percent and BlackRock's 7.96 percent "as of Sept. 30, 2025," and each executive's share count to a specific day. In September, a broker education page from Admiral Markets did the same for Ballmer and Gates, it no longer ranks on the first two pages. Everyone else launders old filings into 2026 by omission.
Watch how the error now compounds. An aggregator freezes a 2014 number. A blog copies the aggregator. Google's AI Overview summarizes the blog. A chatbot answer citing the same chain gets posted to a support forum, ranks, and becomes a source itself. That last step is no longer hypothetical: in October 2026, Google's AI Overview for this query cited exactly such a forum answer. At no point does anyone reopen the filing, so the loop can run for another decade unless the reader breaks it. Which brings us to the only durable fix.
How to check any ownership number yourself
Every number in this article came from EDGAR, the SEC's free public database at sec.gov, and checking one takes minutes once you know which of three documents to open. No account, no paywall, no data subscription.
- For the official owner list: search EDGAR for Microsoft's latest DEF 14A and find the "Principal Shareholders" and "Stock Ownership Information" tables. This is the company's own answer, footnotes included. Read the footnotes, as this article shows, that is where the real dates live.
- For a fund's current position: open the manager's most recent Form 13F and search the table for Microsoft or its identifier, CUSIP 594918104. Note the quarter-end date and which legal entity filed, because large managers now report through several.
- For any individual: run their name through EDGAR's full-text search filtered to Forms 3, 4, and 13D/G. The newest hit is the freshest thing the public record holds, and if it is from 2014, then so is every "current" figure built on it.
The denominator for any percentage you compute lives on the cover page of the latest 10-K or 10-Q, updated to a date a few weeks before filing. Divide, and you will often find you have just produced a fresher number than anything on the first page of Google, which is a strange thing to be able to say about the most-watched company on earth.
Can you buy a stake in Microsoft?
Yes. Microsoft trades on NASDAQ under the ticker MSFT, and one share makes you an owner with the same one vote per share as Vanguard gets, which is the whole difference between this company and the AI startups around it. Ownership at that scale is mostly symbolic, but it is real: you can vote your shares at the December annual meeting, on directors, on executive pay, and on the shareholder proposals that reach the ballot each year. You cannot buy OpenAI, as our breakdown of every claimed path to OpenAI stock shows in detail, but the company holding roughly a quarter of it trades publicly all day. Whether MSFT belongs in a portfolio is a different question, and one this page deliberately does not answer, if you came here on the investing track, the sorting of which AI stocks actually book revenue and which quantum tickers run ahead of their physics is where we do that work.
Which answer did you actually need?
People arrive at this question from different places. The short routes, by reason for asking:
- Settling an argument about Gates: he last disclosed 1.34 percent in 2019, left the board in 2020, and his foundation's trust now reports zero Microsoft shares. He neither owns nor runs it.
- Wondering who controls the company: no one person. One share, one vote, a twelve-seat board, and index funds as the biggest voters. That is who owns Microsoft in the sense the question usually means.
- Checking who profits when you buy Windows or Xbox: the shareholder base above, which by the largest measures is mostly index funds, meaning pension savers and 401(k) holders in aggregate.
- Researching before buying the stock: the ownership table is public paper with dates, read the dates first, then the numbers, and treat anything undated as decoration.
Ownership figures move with every 13F season and every proxy. All numbers on this page were read directly from SEC filings on September 3, 2026 and rechecked against Microsoft's October 21, 2026 proxy on October 23, 2026, the next scheduled updates to the record are the November 2026 13F wave and Microsoft's next quarterly report.
- The register: Microsoft's proxy (filed October 21, 2026) names exactly two owners above 5 percent, Vanguard Capital Management LLC 555,988,240 shares (7.48 percent, from a Schedule 13G filed April 30, 2026) and BlackRock 540,020,228 (7.30 percent, from a Schedule 13G/A filed February 13, 2024).
- Denominator: 7,425,545,491 shares outstanding as of July 23, 2026, per the 10-K cover, and 7,426,426,719 on September 30, 2026, the proxy's record date, the count fell during fiscal 2026 as buybacks outran new grants.
- Insiders: all 18 current directors and executive officers together hold 2,139,607 shares, about 0.03 percent, Nadella holds 918,226.
- Frozen numbers: Ballmer's 333,254,734 dates to his last Form 4 of August 20, 2014, Gates's 102,992,934 (1.34 percent) to the October 2019 proxy, neither has filed since.
- The exit: the Gates Foundation Trust reported zero Microsoft shares as of March 31 and June 30, 2026, down from 28,957,247 in September 2024, per its own quarterly 13F filings.
- Structure: one class of common stock, one vote per share, no cumulative voting, preferred shares authorized but unissued.
- Sources: Microsoft DEF 14A (October 21, 2026), Vanguard Schedule 13G/A (March 27, 2026) and Vanguard Capital Management Schedule 13G (April 30, 2026), Microsoft Form 10-K for fiscal 2026 (July 29, 2026), Gates Foundation Trust Forms 13F-HR (2024 through August 14, 2026), SEC EDGAR full-text search of Ballmer and Gates ownership filings, Microsoft 2019 DEF 14A, Microsoft board announcement of March 13, 2020.
Frequently Asked Questions
Nobody holds a majority. The largest owner Microsoft names is Vanguard Capital Management at 7.48 percent, per the October 2026 proxy, with BlackRock at 7.30. Institutional investors collectively hold most of the stock, but no single entity comes anywhere near 50 percent.
Not in any controlling sense. His last disclosed stake was 102,992,934 shares, 1.34 percent, in the 2019 proxy. He left the board in March 2020, ending his reporting duty, so his current personal holding is unknown.
By the last filed numbers, yes: Ballmer's 2014 filing shows 333,254,734 shares against Gates's 102,992,934 from 2019. Neither figure is current, and neither man has been required to file since, so today's true ranking is unknowable from public records.
Yes. Microsoft has traded publicly since its IPO on March 13, 1986, and lists on NASDAQ under the ticker MSFT. Anyone can buy shares, and each share carries one vote.
No. Microsoft's own 10-K describes an interest of approximately 25 percent in OpenAI, an investment that carries no board control. OpenAI remains governed by its foundation, Microsoft is its largest outside backer, not its owner.
Microsoft owns Copilot outright. It is a Microsoft product built on a mix of licensed OpenAI models and Microsoft's own MAI model family, so the brand, the product, and the infrastructure are all Microsoft's.
No. No government body appears among Microsoft's disclosed holders. The largest state-linked investor is Norway's sovereign wealth fund, whose reported holding as of June 30, 2026 works out to roughly 1.4 percent, and that is Norway's pension money, not a controlling government stake.
Zero, as of its latest filings. The Gates Foundation Trust reported no Microsoft shares for the quarters ending March 31 and June 30, 2026, after selling down from about 29 million shares in late 2024.
None. Microsoft has no parent company and has never had one since going public in 1986. It sits at the top of its own corporate tree, owning subsidiaries like LinkedIn, GitHub, and Activision Blizzard rather than being owned.
7,425,545,491 shares of common stock were outstanding as of July 23, 2026, per the cover of Microsoft's latest 10-K. The count shrinks slightly most years because buybacks retire more shares than employee stock programs create.
My Take
I went into this expecting to write a shareholder list and came out writing about dates. The thing that actually separates a usable answer from a recycled one here is a single column most pages delete: when the number was filed. Once you add it back, the confident consensus dissolves into a 2024 filing inside a 2026 proxy, a 2014 share count sold as current, and a foundation position that quietly hit zero while every wealth tracker kept modeling it.
If you take one habit from this page, make it this: before you repeat any ownership number, for Microsoft or anyone else, find its date. If a page will not tell you when a figure was filed, it is not reporting the number, it is decorating with it. The filings are free, they are public, and as this article shows, reading them beats trusting the first page of Google by an embarrassing margin.
Originally published on Meikuio — Who Owns Microsoft? What the Filings Actually Say.
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