LinkedIn

LinkedIn (LinkedIn Corporation) is the world's largest professional social network, used for career development, recruiting and business connections. It was founded on May 5, 2003 (in Mountain View) by Reid Hoffman together with Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant; it is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. In December 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for $26.2B - Microsoft's largest acquisition at the time. Its CEO is Daniel Shapero (since April 2026, succeeding Ryan Roslansky), and its board chairman is Reid Hoffman. The platform has about 1.3 billion registered users (as of 2026), and reached the 1 billion milestone in November 2023; 2025 revenue was about $17.8B, with roughly 18,500 employees. LinkedIn makes heavy use of artificial intelligence: recommendations and feed ranking, job-candidate matching, generative assistants (writing, career advice) and the 'Economic Graph' - a digital map of the global economy. Its AI features draw on Microsoft and OpenAI models, among others.