Who owns IBM? Top insiders & institutional shareholders

Not galore tech companies tin boast that they’ve been astir for a century, but past again, not galore companies are IBM (IBM).

(Its tagline connected TikTok, humorously, is “Yes, we’re inactive successful business.”)

The mainframe computing elephantine has undergone a singular translation successful the past decade, emerging arsenic a starring unit successful hybrid unreality and AI technology, peculiarly pursuing its 2019 acquisition of Red Hat, which added open-source bundle to its portfolio and helped shares ascent 78%.

In fact, its bundle and AI businesses enabled IBM to decorativeness 2025 arsenic 1 of the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s apical performers, with shares gaining 40% that twelvemonth alone.

The large bluish spot is known for its stable, accordant currency travel (reporting a grounds $14.7 cardinal successful 2025) and for raising its dividend for 30 years successful a row, placing it successful an elite radical known arsenic the dividend aristocrats.

But IBM’s show is not lone shaped by firm strategy; it’s besides influenced by the organization funds and idiosyncratic shareholders who ain it.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) was founded successful 1911 by financier Charles Ranlett Flint. The institution was primitively called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (it changed its sanction successful 1924).

Flint hired Thomas J. Watson to beryllium the company’s archetypal CEO. In the words of IBM, Watson “believed profoundly that the operation of accusation and exertion could make a almighty manufacture unto itself.”  He doubled the company’s gross and took IBM nationalist connected November 11, 1915.

In the decades that followed, IBM felt much similar a “family-run” concern than a publically traded institution owed to the power of Watson, and later, his son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., who was CEO of IBM until 1971.

It was really a communal signifier astatine the clip of IBM's founding for families to clasp controlling interests successful publically owned companies. Stock markets had little liquidity, regulatory oversight was virtually nonexistent, and boards structured deals to springiness founders “super-voting” power.

However, the Watson household ne'er controlled much than 5% of IBM shares. And erstwhile Watson Jr. had a bosom onslaught successful 1971, helium handed the company's reins to T. Vincent Learson, yet exiting the institution wholly erstwhile helium retired from the committee of directors successful 1984.

Today, Watson’s descendants bash not support a important involvement successful IBM, though they person made headlines for disputes implicit their inheritance.

Today, IBM is owned by a wide premix of organization investors and idiosyncratic shareholders. It trades connected the New York Stock Exchange nether the ticker awesome IBM.