Who owns ADT? Ownership structure explained (2026)

ADT is one of the oldest names in American commerce, and one of the most fought-over on the ownership side. The company that started by wiring burglar alarms in the 1870s has passed through Western Union, AT&T, Tyco, and a private-equity buyout, and it now answers to public shareholders once more. For most of the last decade the story of who owns ADT was really the story of one firm, Apollo Global Management, and how quickly it could sell down the position it built in 2016.

That chapter closed in 2026. Apollo sold its final block of stock in May, walking away after nearly ten years. What it left behind is unusual for a company its size: no controlling shareholder, but two large strategic investors, Google and State Farm, that care about ADT for reasons that have little to do with the share price. Understanding ADT's ownership means separating the financial owners who are leaving from the industrial partners who are staying.

This article breaks down who owns ADT today, how the cap table got here, and why the mix of a home-insurance giant and a technology giant sitting on the register matters more than the float.

ADT was founded in 1874 as American District Telegraph, a messenger and signaling business that grew into the central-station alarm industry. It is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. The modern company sells monitored security and smart-home services to homes and small businesses, and its economics rest on recurring monthly revenue rather than one-time hardware sales. Customers pay a subscription for professional monitoring, and ADT earns predictable cash from that base for years after the install.

The scale is substantial. ADT reported total revenue of about $5.1 billion for full-year 2025, up 5% year over year, with end-of-period recurring monthly revenue of $359 million and gross customer revenue attrition of 13.1%. GAAP income from continuing operations was $601 million. The recurring model is the whole point of the business, and it is also what made ADT attractive to a leveraged buyout in the first place, because subscription cash flows can service debt.

ADT remains the clear market leader in residential security, holding roughly a third of the monitored installed base. That leadership is under pressure from lower-cost and self-install rivals whose owners could hardly be more different. A useful contrast is Ring's position inside Amazon, where a camera brand is a feature of a much larger retail and devices empire, rather than a standalone security company that lives or dies on monitoring fees.

ADT Inc. is a public company listed on the NYSE. That simple statement hides a complicated recent history. The current entity is the product of a 2016 buyout by funds affiliated with Apollo Global Management, which acquired the old public ADT for about $6.9 billion and merged it with Protection 1 and other assets in a combined transaction valued near $15 billion. Apollo then relisted the business through an initial public offering in January 2018. From that point ADT was public in name, but Apollo held a controlling majority and set the direction.

Unlike a venture-backed startup, ADT has no founding family or individual holding a meaningful equity stake. The 1874 founders are long gone, and the company's ownership has been institutional for more than a century, passing between corporate parents and, most recently, a private-equity sponsor. There is no founder super-voting class and no founder control to disclose. Control has instead flowed from whoever held the largest block of stock, which for years was Apollo.

The table below traces the transactions that shaped today's cap table, from the buyout through the strategic investments and Apollo's exit.

State Farm is now ADT's largest shareholder. The insurer paid $1.2 billion in 2022 for 133.3 million shares at $9.00 each, taking an initial stake of about 15%. By the time of ADT's April 2026 proxy that position was roughly 16.7% of the common and Class B shares combined, and a subsequent regulatory filing put it near 18% after buybacks shrank the share count. State Farm's interest is strategic, not passive. It wants to bundle monitoring and smart-home sensors with home insurance so it can prevent and detect losses before they turn into claims, and it committed up to $300 million more to fund joint product and marketing work.

Google, through Alphabet, holds about 6% following its $450 million investment in 2020. That deal tied ADT's monitoring to Google's Nest cameras and doorbells and gave ADT a hardware roadmap it could not build alone. Google's motive mirrors the ad-funded logic that runs the rest of its business: hardware and services that keep users inside its ecosystem. The scale of that ecosystem, and the attention marketplace that funds Google's other bets, dwarfs ADT, which is why Google can treat a security stake as a strategic option rather than a core holding.

Beyond the two strategic partners, ADT's register looks like that of any mid-cap public company, with index and institutional managers such as Vanguard and BlackRock holding sizeable but non-controlling positions across the public float.

ADT has two classes of stock. As of late April 2026 there were about 735 million shares of common stock and 54.7 million shares of Class B common stock outstanding, before the May repurchase reduced the common count to roughly 706 million. The Class B shares, associated with the strategic investors, carry the same economic rights but cannot vote on the election of directors, a structure that lets ADT bring large partners onto the cap table without handing them outsized control of the board. With Apollo gone, the genuine public float is now the majority of the company, the widest it has been since the buyout. Investors sizing that valuation against cash flow can run the numbers through a business valuation calculator to see how the recurring-revenue base supports the roughly $5 billion market cap.

James DeVries is the central figure. He has served as chief executive officer since 2018 and added the roles of president and, since September 2023, chairman of the board, giving one executive an unusually broad grip on both management and governance. Jeffrey Likosar is president of corporate development and transformation and has served as chief financial officer since April 2024. The wider executive team includes Fawad Ahmad, a former State Farm executive who joined as chief operating and customer officer in 2025, a hire that underlines how close the State Farm relationship has become.

The board reflects the ownership transition. ADT's April 2026 proxy listed twelve directors, including three designees tied to Apollo and one, Paul J. Smith, designated by State Farm. Apollo's right to nominate directors ran through a stockholders agreement and depended on it owning at least 5% of the common stock. When Apollo sold its remaining shares in May 2026, that threshold was breached and the nomination right fell away, so the Apollo-linked seats are set to unwind. The board is also mid-way through declassifying, moving all directors to annual elections by 2028, and its audit, compensation, and nominating committees are composed entirely of independent directors. Matthew Winter serves as lead independent director.

ADT's most damaging privacy episode involved a Dallas-area technician, Telesforo Aviles, who added his own email address to customer accounts during service visits and used that access to view live and recorded footage from home cameras. The conduct ran from 2013 to 2020 and touched more than 200 households, some captured in private moments. Aviles pleaded guilty to computer fraud and was sentenced to prison, and the case drew class-action claims accusing ADT of negligent oversight. For a company whose entire product is trust in monitoring, the breach struck at the core of the brand.

Earlier litigation targeted the security of the hardware itself. In 2017 ADT agreed to a $16 million settlement resolving class actions in Illinois, Florida, and California that alleged the company sold wireless systems vulnerable to hacking. The claims did not require proof that any individual system was breached, only that the systems were marketed as secure while carrying known weaknesses.

The less visible risk is financial rather than legal. The 2016 buyout loaded ADT with substantial debt, and servicing that leverage has shaped the company's priorities ever since. Apollo's long, staged sell-down also created a persistent overhang on the stock, because the market knew a large holder was a continuous seller. Businesses weighing that kind of ownership and balance-sheet exposure often log it in a formal risk register template so leverage, litigation, and concentration risks are tracked rather than assumed away. Apollo's full exit in 2026 removed the selling overhang, but not the underlying debt.

ADT's ownership matters because the identity of its largest holders now points to where the business is trying to go. For most of the last decade, the dominant owner was a private-equity firm whose goal was to realize a return and exit. That shaped everything from the debt load to the cadence of secondary offerings that capped the stock. With Apollo gone, ADT is no longer managed around a sponsor's exit timeline, which gives management more room to invest for the long term, but also removes a large, engaged owner that helped set strategy.

In Apollo's place stand two partners with industrial logic. State Farm wants fewer and smaller insurance claims, and it sees monitored sensors as a way to prevent water damage, fire, and theft before they happen. Google wants its cameras and voice assistants embedded in more homes. Neither is a natural seller in the way a buyout fund is, which stabilizes the register, but each also has its own agenda that may not always align with ordinary shareholders chasing a stock-price return.

The contrast with rivals is instructive. Competitors in security and smart home sit inside very different ownership structures, from Amazon's control of Ring to the venture-backed independence of newer entrants. A relevant comparison is how Flock Safety is owned, where a fast-growing private company is funded by venture investors betting on growth rather than by public shareholders demanding cash returns. ADT's public listing forces a different discipline: it must fund its smart-home ambitions while returning capital, having sent $791 million back to shareholders through buybacks and dividends in 2025 alone.

For customers, the ownership shift is mostly invisible day to day, but it is not irrelevant. The presence of an insurer and a technology platform on the cap table increases the odds that ADT's future products will be bundled with insurance discounts and tied to a specific hardware ecosystem, which is convenient for some households and constraining for others.

James DeVries is the chief executive officer of ADT. He has led the company since 2018 and also serves as president and, since September 2023, chairman of the board.

Yes. ADT Inc. trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ADT. It was taken private by Apollo Global Management in 2016 and returned to public markets through an IPO in January 2018.

ADT traces to American District Telegraph, founded in 1874. There is no living founder or founding family with an ownership stake today. The company has been institutionally owned for over a century, passing through Western Union, AT&T, Tyco, and Apollo.

After Apollo Global Management sold its entire stake in May 2026, the largest shareholders are State Farm, with roughly 17%, and Google, with about 6%. Both are strategic investors. The remainder is held by public institutions, index funds, and retail investors.

Yes. Apollo took ADT private in 2016 and sold down its position through repeated offerings after the 2018 IPO. In May 2026 it sold its final 102 million shares at $7.25 each, ending its ownership entirely. ADT repurchased a portion of those shares but did not receive any of Apollo's sale proceeds.

ADT's market capitalization was near $5.0 billion in September 2026, with the shares trading around $7.39, down roughly 31% over the prior year. The company generated about $5.1 billion in revenue in 2025. Investors can test that valuation against ADT's cash flows using an intrinsic value calculator.