Which only means he was a 'disaster' from the speculative trader's perspective.

Stock trading has no benefit to a company unless they need to go to the markets for another round of funding, which Microsoft didn't.

This is not true when your employees’ compensation depends on the stock. They all implicitly become speculative traders and watching the employees at Amazon/Google become millionaires in a couple of years caused a lot of brain drain at Microsoft.

I was looking at the candles for all of Microsoft the other day and was surprised (and kind of pissed) that Microsoft didn't really take off until 2015. You could have gotten Microsoft dirt cheap for decades compared to the current issue price.