Short answers, pulled from the story.
Microsoft was founded by childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who formally established the company on the 4th of April 1975, with Gates as CEO. They built it to market a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.
Microsoft is headquartered at One Microsoft Way in Redmond, Washington. The company moved to the Redmond campus on the 26th of February 1986, weeks before going public, after earlier headquarters in Bellevue, Washington.
Microsoft has had three CEOs: Bill Gates from 1975 to 2000, Steve Ballmer from 2000 to 2014, and Satya Nadella from 2014 to the present. Gates handed the role to Ballmer on the 13th of January 2000, and Nadella succeeded Ballmer on the 4th of February 2014.
Microsoft secured a November 1980 contract to supply an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer, branding a purchased CP/M clone as MS-DOS while retaining ownership of it. Because no copyright restriction applied to the operating system, MS-DOS spread to IBM PC compatibles, building Microsoft's dominance, which Windows later extended.
Microsoft has faced antitrust action over practices including per-processor royalty licensing and bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The European Union fined the company 497 million euros in 2004 and 899 million euros in 2008, and the Federal Trade Commission opened a new investigation into its cloud and AI businesses in November 2024.
Microsoft Azure stores data for the Israel Defense Forces, with stored data doubling to over 13.6 petabytes between March and July 2024. A UN expert's report in June 2025 named Microsoft as central to Israel's surveillance apparatus, and the company later said it ended Azure access for the IDF's Unit 8200 after reports it stored surveilled Palestinian phone calls.