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Microsoft Businesses The Almighty Buck

Microsoft's $450 Billion Jump Is Biggest In Stock Market History (bloomberg.com) 44

Microsoft shares surged as much as 17% after reporting 43% growth in Azure revenue, putting the company on track to add a record $490 billion in market value in a single day. Bloomberg notes that it "would eclipse Nvidia's $440 billion addition, following President Donald Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff pause last year, as the biggest ever." From the report: The nearly $500 billion jump is larger than the market capitalization of roughly 96% of S&P 500 stocks, data compiled by Bloomberg show. It's also bigger than the combined value of the benchmark's 44 smallest members, which includes companies like Domino's Pizza Inc., Clorox Co. and Hasbro Inc.

Microsoft's one-day add in value also dwarfs many of the world's other equity markets. South Africa, Turkey, Finland and Vietnam all have total stock market values that are less than what the software maker is set to add on Thursday.

Microsoft's $450 Billion Jump Is Biggest In Stock Market History

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  • Markets have not yet priced Microsoft valuation in post consumer Windows world.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I guess that one will still take a while. We could have a non-Windows EU in 10 or 20 years though. If you remove Windows (and Office), MS technology is just a 3rd rated joke these days. They probably cannot survive the next stage of the CRA either.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        If you remove Windows (and Office), MS technology is just a 3rd rated joke these days.

        And if you keep Windows and Office, MS technology rises to 1st place in the joke department!

    • by shanen ( 462549 ) on Thursday July 30, 2026 @05:50PM (#66265250) Homepage Journal

      What bothers me about this sort of news is that nothing changed. Just some new opinions about what the shares are REALLY worth. Probably not even humans at this point, but more like some AI's "calculated estimated prediction" for what some future sucker will pay. (But the YOB will still claim credit for "wealth creation" out of nothing.)

      Now if we had a contest based on their AIs, I think Microsoft would be in real trouble. Yes, Copilot is one of the leaders in the abject apology category, but its sycophancy is inferior and it's answers are often even worse than the google's Gemini in the categories related to truth and utility.

      It would be kind of funny if it turned out that the AI that drove this change in the stock price was actually Copilot under some level of disguise. Even funnier if Copilot was making its own stock trades under another level of disguise. Talk about self-dealing.

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        You're going to buy a car with a list price of $X. Then you find out that it was in a bad hailstorm, or driven by the dealership owner's kid all summer or something. Nothing has changed, so you're still willing to pay list price, right?

        More similar to this situation, you're selling your corner store. Corner stores of that kind are typically worth about $Y. However, a new school opened close by and your store is suddenly making twice as much as similar stores. Nothing has changed, so you're still willing to

      • Everyone is talking about the AI bubble. Between inflation and the rate pause decision, the market took a trouncing last week, especially tech.

        Microsoft, a huge spender in the space, is reporting blockbuster earnings. That signals to investors that Microsoft, and other companies, might be profitable after all and the bubble won't be bursting.

        As such, they all go and try to buy shares before they spike too much, looking to sell them sometime in the future for $800 a share.

        Have enough of these people trying

        • by shanen ( 462549 )

          Mostly the ACK, but I feel like your point is that the wind changed from one direction to another. However I think the funny part is that each of the speculators believes he will be the one who is smart enough to know exactly when to take the money and run before the wind stops blowing at all.

    • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday July 30, 2026 @06:06PM (#66265262)

      But maybe they have?

      Windows+Xbox was less than 10% of their revenue. They note it is in decline and looking at the bulk of the revenue, not much of it seems vulnerable to people just not caring about Windows. Their cloud business is the bulk of their business and it is not particularly sensitive to OS selection on desktops.

      One might argue that Microsoft 365 is at least in part tied to the Windows platform, but in my experience non-Windows businesses still buy into it, even if their users are largely relegated to browser based access only. At this point they have businesses so scared of not having it, they would have it even if they were just phones and ipads. You *never* want to risk a customer or partner sending you some office document that can't be read, and whether or not other options are actually capable hardly matters in the face of the *impression* that anything less than Microsoft is a risk.

      The biggest unknown that I think would be sensitive would be the 'consumer cloud' portion of Microsoft 365. That's going to be mostly people who clicked through the Windows built-in advertising for using Microsoft 365 as storage and backup for their laptop and add-on software from device sales that prod users to up-sell to Office. The release doesn't make it clear what the absolute number there is, but I seem to recall hearing that's actually a pretty small number too.

      Microsoft is primarily a cloud and Office company now, and I'm wagering the markets have largely already accepted that.

    • They already did a long time ago. The share of revenue from windows is only like 10% of revenue and has been that way for like a decade.

    • Given how little revenue MS derives from Windows in a consumer world, and how there's zero move away from Windows in the corporate world the market is right to ignore your fantasy scenario.

  • Xbox is still a train wreck. Windows is getting obliterated by Chromebooks in schools and Linux in Gaming. Copilot is DOA and nobody wants it. I know they did some deal with Nvidia or OpenAI or something to buy more shit that nobody wants with no way to power it. Did they announce they're cancelling all AI projects or something? Nothing that I saw in the news this entire week merits a jump this high.
    • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday July 30, 2026 @05:16PM (#66265198) Homepage Journal

      Azure did better than expected, that's it.

      Give them a few more months of business as usual and there will be a correction

      • Did they fix Azure's stability problems or just gouge the customers they already have? I thought that Azure might take a fall due to a serious lack of quality thinking in distributed computing, but that's just based on what former Azure engineers were saying. Maybe they rapidly improved things by moving the devs they had on "Put copilot in everything" to "make Azure work right".

        • AI fixes everything.

          Hold that thought. We're getting word that it sucks.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          They probably just did not have any major Azure security compromises or outages in the last few months. Obviously, that will not keep.

          Personal recent experience? The one time I tried to use o365 email in the last 3 weeks, I had to wait for an hour until it was up again. Utterly pathetic.

      • It won't even take a few months. Fund managers will be looking at this and hitting the sell button tomorrow to capture the alpha and move on.

        Expect it to be down a double-digit percent tomorrow.

        • Up 3% today, aka yesterday's tomorrow.

          This is why I don't trade stocks, I don't know shit either, but you sure can't take most people's advice

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They have a lot of momentum by mindless followers that cannot imagine ever using something different.

      • Now back in reality consumers don't give a shit and just use whatever is installed on their computers, and corporations actually have a reasonably compelling integrated product from Microsoft that has no equal in terms of a complete package. To pretend otherwise is to not understand what the Office / Azure business even is about.

        Your fantasy that Microsoft is successful because people are mindless sheep is just demonstrating your own ignorance.

    • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Thursday July 30, 2026 @06:13PM (#66265274)

      No one can hear the failure of their consumer platform business over the massive flow of money for their cloud and office businesses.

      If they shrugged and canned the entire Xbox and Windows things entirely, that's less than 9% of their revenue, and likely an even tinier portion of their profit. They would probably also lose all their consumer Microsoft 365 except people who never check and cancel subscription services, but that's probably similarly tiny in the scheme of the business.

      You basically have a story of robust cloud revenue and also as I understand some 'rotation' in the market as investors decide that the AI darlings are probably going to be already as high as they can get for a while, and it's time to cash in and switch to other companies that either seem plausible for share price growth or at *least* actually profitable today with dividends and/or stock buybacks. So the viable quarter came at just the right time to catch investors looking to cash out of their big AI investments for the short term.

    • It's all a big tech corporation money circle jerk.

    • "Copilot is DOA and nobody wants it."

      You must be retired. It's ubiquitous in enterprise (where Microsoft makes their money). It's very expensive and and very desired in my experience.

    • You wrote a lot of text asking a question that could have been answered by reading only the first half of the first sentence of the summary.

  • This is the real reason Microsoft is funding the AI hype train. Nobody can buy a computer because the AI labs are hoarding all the hardware, so now you have to use MS's cloud.

    • So microsoft is throwing billions into data centers for the purpose of driving up gpu and mem prices and creating scarcity so that they can prevent you from buying a pc which would make you less likely to use a microsoft cloud premium service becauseâ¦. are you drunk?
  • Logically a companies stock price might reflect the amount of money a stock holder would expect to get back from owning the stock. If Microsoft were to return every last penny of profit to its stock holders today, and it returns less than a third of its profits now so that will have to change, and somehow continued to earn $35 billion a quarter, and people wanted to earn their money back while holding the stock in 20 years, Microsoft would be worth $2.8 trillion.

    That gives you the timeline for doubling you
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      According to Yahoo finance [yahoo.com], Tesla has a market capitalization of around $1.18 trillion and a totally outrageous price-to-earnings ratio around 290. Some other popular stocks are also clearly overvalued. I believe the stock market often, including now, operates at least partly on a "bigger fool" principle: it doesn't matter how much you pay for something, or how much it's intrinsically "worth", as long as you can find a bigger fool who will pay you more for it than you paid. Much like gambling or Bitcoin, th
  • “The Cloud” is the provider throwing the development, costs, and maintenance tasks onto the end user. In return for my paying them a yearly rent for a VM. Leaving the end user with the costs of turning that rented machine into something that generates revenue.
    • If that's the deal you got, you got a worse deal than everybody else.
    • The end user always pays for things they use.

      Renting is a perfectly legitimate way to obtain the use of something, whether it's a house, a car, or a server. Sure, you might be a higher rate per month than if you buy, but you also don't have to pay to maintain the thing you're renting. That's the owner's job.

      Renting is a tradeoff. Buying is a tradeoff. As a homeowner, I can tell you that buying isn't for the faint of heart. You don't pay monthly rent, but you DO pay big air conditioner replacement costs. Har

      • > The end user always pays for things they use.

        We were originally told we would save money by moving to “The Cloud”. In this we were misinformed :o
        • Actually, I don't think we were misinformed.

          The reason so many companies spend wildly on Azure or AWS, is that they don't properly manage their resources. When you use the cloud, you have to think more about what you actually need.

          The problem is a habit that came from the days when everybody self-hosted. They would buy a machine, stand it up, and use it. When that machine wasn't as useful, it wasn't costing them anything to keep it sitting there, so they just let it sit there, idle, or under-utilized. They

  • Azure is garbage and over-priced.

    The only way this works is with OpenAI and/or others doing AI in "Azure". I wouldn't be surprised if some of that "Azure" looks more like hosting for people that need a lot of hardware and power.

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