Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, starting out as a software company developing a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. It quickly become central to the personal computing revolution, including through its early collaboration with Apple, where Apple licensed Microsoft's BASIC for the Apple II in 1977.

Microsoft today overtook Apple as the world's most valuable public company by market value. Apple's share price dropped by just one percent, enabling Microsoft to narrowly pull ahead of Apple at a value of $2.87 trillion.Microsoft has briefly overtaken Apple as the most valuable company since 2018, most recently in 2020 and 2021 when concerns about supply chain shortages dented Apple's stock price and a boom in remote working bolstered Microsoft. Over the past year, Microsoft's support for artif...