Microsoft announced on Monday that they are set to buy GitHub, a software development platform for$7.5 billion in stock. Based on Forbes estimates, GitHub co-founder and CEO Chris Wanstrath will receive as much as $1.5 billion in Microsoft stock. He is GitHub’s single largest shareholder, a source familiar with the company’s finances told Forbes.

This is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s second big acquisition, following the $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn two years ago. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion back in 2015, and Microsoft is paying $7.5 billion in stock for the company in a deal that should close later this year. Former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman (and now Microsoft corporate vice president) will become GitHub’s CEO. GitHub founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow and work on strategic software initiatives. Wanstrath had retaken his CEO role after his co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned following a harassment investigation in 2014.
Apple, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. There are 85 million repositories hosted on GitHub, and 28 million developers contribute to them.
Just as Microsoft made Office the must-have toolkit for businesses of the ’90s and ’00s, GitHub could become the de facto standard for businesses everywhere — not just the most forward-thinking teams.
That’s because Microsoft has the power not only to integrate GitHub into its suite of developer tools and offerings but also into its broader suite of business tools. This is an incredibly compelling plan to bring non-developers and even non-technical workers closer to the code.GitHub says that as of March 2018, there were 28 million developers in its community, and 85 million code repositories, making it the largest host of source code globally and a cornerstone of how many in the tech world build software.