Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2012. The returns “to date”, the author’s age of 33 and the claim about Bill Gates’s daily earnings all refer to that time.
It seems surprising to say that if we had bought Apple shares in 1980, we would be looking at a gain to date of 114,103% (that’s 114 thousand percent). Yet those figures fall far short of the returns achieved by Microsoft over a shorter period. Microsoft’s share price has risen no less than 6,714,900% since 1986. In other words, if my father had bought me €100 in Microsoft shares when I was 7, at 33 I could cash in more than €6 million. We’d probably be past €7 million if we count the dividends it started paying in 2002.
Microsoft was one of the penny stocks, trading at less than $0.01. Apple had a product that seemed very strange to people. “A personal computer? What on earth do we need a computer for? That gadget will never catch on, who’s going to buy one?” That was the thinking at the time.
If Apple’s product was something unnecessary and useless for the general public, Microsoft’s product was a hieroglyph to most people. “An operating what…? – An operating system, madam. – And what’s that?…”
Only a few visionaries came to trust that odd guy, Bill Gates: a brainbox, a mad genius who was also shy and showed no sign of leadership. Who would have thought someone like that would end up earning more than €24,000 a day? On top of that, there was the scandal in Silicon Valley at the time over the alleged theft of the idea from Steve Jobs, which kept potential investors constantly afraid of a lawsuit from Apple that never came, or never materialised.
Few people thought those two odd characters were going to create the future that drives us today, and certainly few thought they could literally have become millionaires by trusting in their products.
Well, the next Bill Gates and Steve Jobs probably already have their companies listed on the stock market. Will they be pharmaceutical companies, renewables, or some odd product we wouldn’t bet a single euro on? Which companies could they be?
Further reading
Featured image: HombreDHojalata, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
