Microsoft agrees to a $250 million settlement. The Swedish pension fund Sjunde AP-Fonden filed the suit back in 2022, arguing that former CEO Bobby Kotick rushed the $69 billion sale to Microsoft while the company's stock sat depressed under the weight of workplace scandal, locking shareholders into a $95-per-share price lower than they might otherwise have secured. By the way no one cares about the scandal, this is purely we could have made more money lawsuit.
The reason it mattered more than a standard valuation dispute is that AP7 tied its argument directly to the misconduct narrative, which made it the one remaining case capable of dragging those allegations into open court.
One way to look at this is, you have to look at how the original misconduct claims were resolved, which is to say they weren't, not in any tested sense. The California Civil Rights Department case settled for $54 million in December 2023 without anyone admitting wrongdoing, meaning the underlying allegations were never examined through a full trial.
A Delaware judge let the AP7 case proceed against Kotick and several board members in October 2025, rejected the separate theory that Microsoft had colluded to push the price down. That ruling kept alive the possibility of a courtroom reckoning the California settlement had sidestepped. Microsoft writing a cheque now makes that possibility vanish, and the structure of the payment will be 40 percent from Microsoft and 60 percent from directors' and officers' liability insurance.
The Settlement Language Does Real Work
The agreement frames it as "nothing was ever proven". The filing has AP7 acknowledging that its original claims rested partly on media reporting and on CRD characterizations that the department itself later conceded, in a court-approved consent decree, had never been "substantiated" by any court or independent investigation. Microsoft's own statement goes further, explicitly denying that there was systemic or widespread misconduct at Activision or that Kotick and the board acted improperly. In plain terms, the people settling didn't just agree to stop fighting, they agreed on a shared account of events in which the misconduct allegations are characterized as unverified. For a saga that began with one of the most damaging workplace-culture stories in gaming, that's a unique position to end.
Kotick's Countersuit and the Embracer Theory Disappear Too
The settlement also sweeps away another chapter. Kotick, represented by Alex Spiro, had counter-sued AP7 for "abuse of process," alleging the lawsuit was secretly tied to Embracer Group through an AP7 executive, Emma Ihre, who had previously worked at the Swedish conglomerate. His lawyers framed it as a competitive attack designed to hamstring Activision while benefiting Embracer's own games. Embracer flatly denied any coordination, and AP7 dismissed the theory as "rambling, bizarre and baseless." The roughly 30 cents per share heading to affected shareholders is the tidy public number. The quieter outcome is that a four-year fight with the potential to reopen Activision's most serious allegations ends with this settlement.
More:Activision Blizzard to pay $54.9m Settlement
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