$Microsoft(MSFT)$ Ten years ago, Microsoft was around $50 (split-adjusted), trading at about 21x earnings. The market viewed it as a legacy Windows/Office name that missed the mobile wave, with Azure playing second fiddle to AWS.
Today, it's around $390, still at about 21x earnings. But the underlying business is a completely different story. Intelligent Cloud is running at a ~$135B revenue pace, with commercial RPO around ~$630B, up 99% year-over-year.
What the market is worried about: AI capex pressure, concentration on OpenAI, and the risk that AI could compress the per-seat software model Microsoft was built on.
What might be getting missed: Microsoft isn't just defending those seats—it's turning them into the distribution layer for enterprise AI via Copilot.
With ~$630B already locked in the backlog, the multiple starts to look less like "expensive growth" and more like "cash flow visibility the market is still mispricing."
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