Mojang (Minecraft)

The founder

Markus Persson, born in Stockholm in 1979, began programming at age 7 and never finished high school. He worked as a game developer, including at King.com, before writing the first version of Minecraft in roughly a week in 2009 while at Mojang. The game became one of the best-selling video games of all time; Persson left Microsoft and the games industry almost immediately after the sale.

How it was sold

Microsoft acquired Mojang for $2.5 billion in cash, announced September 15, 2014 and closed that November, folding Minecraft into its Xbox and broader gaming ecosystem. Persson has said he sold partly because he didn’t want the pressure of running a company at Minecraft’s scale of cultural significance.