Stephen Elop is the 7th biggest individual shareholder of Microsoft
talk.maemo.org
talk.maemo.org
I have not seen 1 insightful post since this FUD has been spreading. It's amazing how much petty hatred is out there towards Microsoft...
I don't even think this has anything to do with Microsoft itself, but rather with people's psychological need to create conspiracies, to see themselves as the little guy fighting the big guy, and pretend that they have knowledge / can see what other's can't.
Sinofsky isn't listed, and just 2 weeks ago he reported 737,000 shares, which would make him #4 on that list. [1]
Ray Ozzie has just under 1 million shares, and again he's not listed. [2]
The way you assemble these kinds of tables is by mining the SEC filing Form 4, "Statement of Changes in Beneficial Ownership of Securities". But you have to include every Form 4 for your data to be at all accurate.
So already we can see that Elop is #9, and that's just by me guessing two people who seemed conspicuously absent. There could be dozens of others. And don't forget that non-executives don't have to report their shares. I would bet a few grands that there are senior developers who have been working at Microsoft for 15 or 20 years who own more than $3M in stock.
In fact, I just cast my first ever "flag" vote on HN. (With gusto, I might add.) This doesn't deserve the #1 slot.
[1] http://google.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?...
'So now Nokia's decision to replace Symbian has nothing to do with a careful analysis of the situation, but everything to do with keeping $3 million dollars worth of Microsoft stock on the up for 1 man'See: http://yle.fi/uutiset/news/2011/02/nokia_elop_buying_shares_...
Which includes:
Tallqvist told YLE that Elop will divest all of his Microsoft shares as soon as security exchange regulations and Nokia's own internal directives allow. Elop intends to purchase Nokia shares as soon as it is legally possible.
As an executive at MS who announced his role at Nokia while at MS, it was all but impossible to liquidate quickly, given all the disclosure that needs to happen to avoid insider trading issues.
There's no conspiracy or conflict of interest since all of his MS shares will be gone before any actual work product from the alliance has occurred.
As a general rule, whenever someone uses a phrase as awkward as "actual work product", they're trying to twist the truth.
Stock price relies on more than just reported earnings. The announcement that Nokia has bet the company on Windows Phone 7 affects MSFT's price now.
I think it's naive to say that he chose to go down the Microsoft route because he is one of its largest individual shareholders. It is equally as likely that Elop would have made his decision regardless of his $MSFT stock ownership. A little too much FUD for me in this case.
/edit: Would you like people to talk about you like this just because you switched jobs after 2 years time?
if I switched 3 senior executive jobs in 4 years and then went on to become CEO one of the most known companies in the world today, then yes, absolutely.
The scrutiny in this case comes directly from the fact that Elop's actions at Nokia are very much Microsoft centric, and arguably Microsoft serving.
No he doesn't. WP7, even under the best case circumstances, will have limited impact on Microsoft stock. People with tens of millions of dollars are connected to far better investment opportunities than making a stock bump up in value a few percentage points.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-13/nokia-chief-elop-to...
The board brought on Elop to do precisely what he did - any ire should be directed squarely at them.
Say what you will about RIMM, at least they aren't striking at the prospect of QNX replacing their OS.
As Nokia said, it is a war of eco-systems now; not devices. Even a low-end Android beats a better spec'ed Nokia because the software is so much better. The quality of apps on Ovi store says it all.
Really? The Ovi Store is pathetic, and even though they have improved a bit recently it comes nowhere close to the other platforms. Casual games are very important, Ovi has less to offer than the nascent Windows Marketplace.
I am among the few who think this is better for Nokia, given the alternative. Nokia is a hardware company. They don't do great software, and they just accepted that fact.
Btw, they might have a gotten a good deal with Microsoft too, given the situation MS itself is in. WP7 is a great OS, and the collaboration with Nokia could see it appearing on cheaper devices. Nokia is famous for making affordable devices that can survive a drop or two. In fact, I know many people who WANT a Nokia with a decent OS.
There are serious competitive considerations for Nokia not choosing Android. I think Elop outlines them pretty intelligently here - http://video.allthingsd.com/video/nokia-ceo-on-choosing-wind...
1) The platform would succeed.
2) They'd be one among a crowd of Android phone manufacturers.
3) It would be hard to differentiate from the others.
Contrast that to Windows Phone 7, where:
1) The platform is playing catch-up, and may fail entirely.
2) They're already one among a crowd of Windows Phone manufacturers, with LG, Samsung and HTC already shipping, and Dell having devices in the pipeline.
3) The party that controls the platform has chosen not to allow differentiation, requiring all the devices to be lookalikes[1].
On all his supposed drawbacks of Android, WP7 looks even worse.
There's some other odd stuff in the video, which begs for explanation. He starts by saying that "Microsoft has placed a large bet on us." But it isn't yet obvious why Microsoft has bet more on Nokia's success than it has on the success of the other WP7 handset manufacturers. And if they have, I can't imagine HTC or Samsung being happy about it.
There's also some stuff at about 2:30 about how each party has licensed technology from the other, with an implication (though not an outright statement) that money might be flowing both ways. If that's true, it raises the possibility that the sale of an HTC WP7 handset results in royalty payments to Nokia, for the mapping technology that Microsoft has licensed. That could cause real friction with the other vendors.
(To clarify: the mapping technology bit was part of the announcement, though it wasn't clear what it was doing there; the payment structures were not announced, but Elop did seem to imply in that video that money would be going both ways, and I'm not sure what other reason there is that Microsoft would have to write checks to Nokia.)
[1] http://mobilementalism.com/2011/02/12/the-photo-the-nokia-fa... has a photo (second in the post) with a bunch of them. They all really do look alike.
Microsoft is already in the habit of paying companies to force their users to use Bing search (see Verizon replacing Google search with Bing on some of their Android phones).
Though for Nokia's sake I hope they're not getting paid per use but per device. Bing's quality outside the US is dreadful, so the vast majority of Nokia's customers are either getting a crappy experience or will somehow need to replace the default search engine.
I wouldn't discard that possibility. Phone makers have to pay to call their Android sets Android and to have the Gmail, Google Maps and other Google properties on their phones. Maybe Microsoft is giving them a boatload of money and saying "spend this money to make WP7 suck less, for we can't to it ourselves" on the condition they sell only WP7 phones.
We don't know what's in the package. This could give Nokia time enough so it can be carved into smaller sellable pieces before the whole thing collapses.
The whole thing would collapse anyway without an aggressive course correction. MeeGo isn't going anywhere and Symbian is doomed. They could have gone Android, but I guess the board thinks the company is doomed no matter what is done and that WP7 is what brings it more time.
Not all shareholders are publicly reported — there are likely hundreds, even thousands, with larger individual stakes, both those still working Microsoft and not. Moreover, that list doesn't even necessarily report all of the holdings of each individual, many listed in public filings can and do own far larger amounts (by orders of magnitudes).
I'm not sure what reporting requirements dictated Elop be listed there to begin with, but regardless, the article is wrong.
HN desperately needs the ability to retroactively retract such silliness when it happens (which it does from time to time), because people tend to quote and repeat headlines so quickly these days that they create their own truth. (Six months from now, if someone says, "Isn't Elop the 7th biggest individual shareholder of Microsoft", you'd say, "Yeah, I remember hearing that, I think he is.")
Case in point:
http://www.google.com/search?q=7th+biggest+individual+shareh...
Sigh.
and why would that be?
I guess majority of his current net worth is in MSFT, and future success of NOK is now firmly tied to MSFT as well.
That would mean that his net worth is only around 4-5 million and I doubt that is the case...
What reitzensteinm means is that his stake in Microsoft is probably only a small part of his net worth. I would also guess that he owns significantly more (from a number_of_shares*share_price point of view) of Nokia than of Microsoft. That is why "his financial future is far more tied with the success of Nokia than Microsoft".
Should he have excluded going with MS as an option just because he worked there?
What would it mean if he switched nokia to windows while holding a lot of google stock?
trough the process known as "election"
Elop's background and shareholdings would be well understood by Nokia's board.
very optimistic statement
Much ado has been made about him having $0 Nokia stock. This just means that he hasn't executed any of his Nokia options yet, and hasn't been awarded any stock as part of his bonus yet. Neither is suprising: He hasn't been with Nokia for a year yet and he certainly has a vesting schedule.