One Week, Two and a Half Billion Dollars (2026)

In May 2009 a programmer in Stockholm spent six days building a game and gave it away. By 2014 the company that grew around it was bought for two and a half billion dollars, and he had left. This episode traces the whole arc — what made it work, and what it cost the person who made it.

The story in short

Minecraft was assembled, not invented. Persson had been building games for a decade before it, and he took the terrain from Infiniminer, the survival loop from Dwarf Fortress, and the world generation from a game he had already built himself. What he added was timing and nerve: a public build six days in, and a price list published three weeks later.

That price list is the hinge of the whole story. He sold the unfinished game at a discount with all future updates included, and used the buyers' money instead of investors' money to build the thing. By the time the game formally released in November 2011, more than four million people had already paid for it and it had taken in about thirty-two million dollars.

The company that grew around it stayed deliberately tiny — twenty-five people producing about two hundred and thirty-eight million dollars of revenue in 2012 — and turned down nearly every investor and buyer that came calling, including a private-jet pitch from Sean Parker. Then a licensing dispute in June 2014 turned a large part of the community against Persson personally, and within three months the company was being sold to Microsoft.

The timeline you hear

Date	What happened
May 11, 2009	Persson starts work on the game that becomes Minecraft.
May 17, 2009	The first public build goes up free on the indie game forum where he spent his time. 1
June 10, 2009	The prices are published: nine ninety-five in alpha, fourteen ninety-five in beta, twenty at release, all future updates included. 2
June 15, 2009	Two days after pre-orders open, PayPal freezes his account on suspicion of fraud. 1
September 17, 2010	Mojang is incorporated with Jakob Porsér; Carl Manneh joins as chief executive.
December 2010	The Yogscast begin the Minecraft series that becomes Shadow of Israphel. 3
January 12, 2011	One million copies sold. 4
November 18, 2011	Version 1.0 releases on stage at the first MineCon in Las Vegas, a week later than announced. 5
May 9, 2012	The Xbox 360 Edition, built by 4J Studios, launches and breaks the console's digital sales records within a day. 6
February 4, 2013	Reuters reports the founders have decided Mojang will stay private. 7
June 16, 2014	After the EULA backlash, Persson offers his share of the company for sale in a tweet.
September 15, 2014	Microsoft announces it is buying Mojang for two and a half billion dollars. 8
November 6, 2014	The acquisition closes.
October 15, 2023	Three hundred million copies sold. 9

The numbers behind the episode

Mojang's 2012 accounts, reported from Swedish filings, show revenue of about two hundred and thirty-eight million dollars against pre-tax profit of roughly ninety-two million, with twenty-five employees. 10 The 2013 figures are reported inconsistently — revenue between two hundred and eighty-seven and three hundred and thirty million dollars depending on who did the currency conversion — which is why the episode gives a range instead of a number. 11

Persson held seventy-one percent of the company at the exit, through a holding company, which came to about one point eight billion dollars. Staff who stayed six months after the sale received roughly three hundred thousand dollars each, paid from his share.

Quotes you hear

"All future updates of the game, including all expansions and addons. You never have to pay again." — Markus Persson, announcing the price, June 2009 2

"You can only eat so much until you get full, right? We are so happy where we are." — Jakob Porsér, co-founder, to Reuters, February 2013 7

"I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a CEO. I'm a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter." — Markus Persson, September 2014 12

"I've become a symbol. I don't want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don't understand." — Markus Persson, September 2014 12

One claim the episode does not make

You will often hear that Mojang spent nothing on marketing. There is no source in which the company says this, and the episode does not repeat it. What the record supports is narrower and more interesting: the game spread by word of mouth and through the videos players made for each other, at a moment when nobody was paying to make that happen.