Microsoft the advertising company aQuantive, which had been acquired for $6.2 billion back in 2007. As of January 2014, Microsoft's market capitalization stood at $314B, making it the 8th largest company in the world by market capitalization. On November 14, 2014, Microsoft overtook Exxon Mobil to become the 2nd most valuable company by market capitalization, behind only Apple Inc. Its total market value was over $410B — with the stock price hitting $50.04 a share, the highest since early 2000. In 2015, Reuters reported that Microsoft Corp had earnings abroad of $76.4 billion which were untaxed by the IRS. Under U.S.
Microsoft v. United States (2016 lawsuit) customers in violation of the company's and customers' rights. Microsoft also had the backing of companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Dropbox and Salesforce in the lawsuit. The company claimed that over the 18 months prior, federal judges had approved 2,600 secret searches of Microsoft customers' data, with 68 percent of those cases involving secrecy orders with no expiration date banning Microsoft from notifying customers about the searches. Microsoft argued that "the future of cloud computing is in jeopardy if customers can't trust that their data will remain private." The lawsuit concerned the portion of federal law that deals with