Much less so than any owner of Twitter, Google or Facebook is anyway. Microsoft is just selling unopinionated software to all businesses in the world. Out of all FAANG they’re the least politically aligned.
> Microsoft is just selling unopinionated software to all businesses in the world
You have to be satirical right? Microsoft is notorious for lobbying everything to this day. Browser monopolies, OS monopolies, they pretty much invented EEE, made whole cities switch to their OS and the whole xbox platform is very political regarding software, gambling and IP politics.
Hell, they're so not FAANG, they're not even in the acronym.
But I get it. If I were slotting tech companies into eras, they'd be before Facebook/Google, but after the real old school guys like IBM, AT&T, and Xerox.
I was thinking about this yesterday, and if FAANG means “big tech companies with continued big growth”, M is more deserving of the title than, for instance, G. FAAN all have over 300% return over past 5 years, as does M. G however is at like 130%, roughly the same as the Nasdaq. Which to me roughly means they aren’t growing faster than the average tech company (NASDAQ being roughly an index of tech)
I also felt that the N was out of place as its market cap is about 1/3 the next smallest (FB at $0.77B vs. $0.22B). The rest (and MSFT) are all > $1B. NFLX has a lower cap than NVDA, ADBE, and PYPL (and TSLA and BABA).
My sense is that in America, people outside the tech world don't even think of him as the founder of Microsoft anymore. He's just Bill Gates the incredibly rich philanthropist.
Are you not familiar with the very prevalent conspiracy theories about him wanting to microchip people, how the coronavirus vaccine is his attempt to do, etc? It's been all over the internet.
As a Brit, I think he's just viewed as "the rich computer guy". It's hard to fathom that people think he's involved with political topics.