Who owns HP? Ownership structure explained (2026)

Ask "who owns HP" and the honest answer is: almost everyone and no one. HP Inc. has no founding family holding company, no private equity sponsor, and no billionaire with a controlling block. Its shares sit mostly in index funds and pension portfolios, which means the largest single voices in the room are the big passive managers who own a slice of nearly every large American company.

There is a naming trap worth clearing up first. In 2015, the original Hewlett-Packard Company split into two separate, independently traded companies. HP Inc. (ticker HPQ) kept the personal-computer and printing businesses. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (ticker HPE) took the servers, networking, and enterprise-services businesses. They share a heritage and a logo lineage, but they have separate boards, separate management, and separate shareholders. This article is about HP Inc., the PC-and-printer company most people mean when they type "HP."

That distinction matters for ownership because the two companies attract different investors and trade on different stories. HP Inc. is a cash-generative hardware business returning money to shareholders. HPE is an enterprise-infrastructure company chasing AI-server growth. Owning one does not mean owning the other.

HP traces its roots to a Palo Alto garage in 1939, where Stanford classmates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the business with about $538 in capital. The garage is now treated as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Over the following decades Hewlett-Packard grew from test-and-measurement instruments into one of the world's largest technology companies, spanning printers, PCs, servers, and IT services.

The modern corporate structure dates to November 1, 2015, when Hewlett-Packard Company divided in two. The legacy entity was renamed HP Inc. and retained the Personal Systems (PCs, laptops, workstations, and peripherals) and Printing (hardware, supplies, and services) segments. HP Inc. remains headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

HP Inc. is one of the largest PC and printer vendors in the world. For fiscal 2025, which ended October 31, 2025, the company reported net revenue of $55.3 billion, up 3.2% from the prior year, with GAAP diluted earnings per share of $2.65 and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $3.12. It generated $2.9 billion in free cash flow and returned $1.9 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks.

HP Inc. is a publicly held company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker HPQ. It has a single class of common stock, so there is no dual-class arrangement giving founders or insiders outsized voting power. One share equals one vote. Control rests with whoever holds the shares, and today that is an overwhelmingly institutional base of index funds, asset managers, and pension funds.

Neither Bill Hewlett nor Dave Packard is a shareholder of HP Inc. today. Both founders died decades ago (Packard in 1996, Hewlett in 2001), and the philanthropic foundations tied to their families, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, diversified out of concentrated HP holdings long before the 2015 split. There is no founding-family control block in HP Inc. Insider ownership by current directors and executives is small, typical of a large, mature public company, and is disclosed each year in the company's proxy statement rather than through any special class of stock.

HP Inc. did not raise venture capital in the modern sense. It is an 80-year-old company whose ownership has been public for generations. Rather than a funding-round history, its ownership story is one of corporate actions: the original public listing, decades of buybacks, and the 2015 separation that split one shareholder base into two. The table below traces the key structural events that shaped who owns HP today.

The Vanguard Group is HP Inc.'s largest shareholder, holding roughly 132 million shares, or about 13.8% of the company, as of December 31, 2025. Vanguard's stake reflects HP's inclusion in the index funds that dominate its lineup rather than any active bet on the PC market.

BlackRock is the second-largest holder. Its most recent Schedule 13G disclosures put its position in the range of roughly 9% to 12% of shares outstanding, depending on the filing date, again driven largely by index and ETF products such as its iShares funds.

State Street rounds out the trio of dominant passive managers, holding roughly 53 million shares, or in the region of 5% to 6%, as of late 2025. Together, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street control a substantial minority of HP Inc., which is common for large-cap US stocks and gives passive managers meaningful say in governance votes. Other significant holders include active managers such as Dodge & Cox and Primecap Management.

The most notable recent name in HP's ownership history is Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett's company disclosed in April 2022 that it had bought around 121 million shares, close to 11% of HP Inc., making it one of the largest holders at the time. The timing proved poor. PC demand collapsed after the pandemic-era boom, and Berkshire began selling in September 2023, unwinding the position over the following months and exiting entirely by early 2024. As of 2026, Berkshire is no longer a shareholder.

Because HP Inc. has no controlling owner, effective control sits with the board of directors and senior management, who answer to that dispersed institutional shareholder base.

The leadership picture changed sharply in early 2026. On February 3, 2026, HP announced that Enrique Lores, who had served as president and CEO for seven years and worked at HP for 36 years, was stepping down to pursue another opportunity, and was also leaving the board. The board appointed Bruce Broussard, a director since 2021 and the former CEO of health insurer Humana, as interim CEO effective immediately. The board formed a CEO search committee and retained an executive search firm to find a permanent replacement, so the identity of HP's next long-term chief executive was still unresolved as of this writing.

Chip Bergh, the former Levi Strauss chief executive, serves as chairman of the board. The rest of the board is composed of independent directors drawn from technology, finance, and consumer industries, consistent with the governance profile of a widely held large-cap company. No single director or executive holds a stake large enough to control the company.

HP Inc.'s most dramatic ownership battle came in 2019 and 2020, when Xerox, a company roughly a third of HP's size, launched a cash-and-stock bid worth around $35 billion, or $24 per share, and moved to replace HP's entire board. HP's board rejected the offer as undervaluing the company and adopted a shareholder rights plan, commonly called a poison pill, to block a creeping takeover. Activist investor Carl Icahn, who held stakes in both companies, backed the merger and pushed publicly for a deal. Xerox abandoned the bid on March 31, 2020, citing the market turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In late 2025, HP announced a company-wide restructuring, disclosing plans to cut between 4,000 and 6,000 jobs, up to about 10% of its workforce, through fiscal 2028. Management framed the move around artificial intelligence, both as an efficiency tool inside the company and as a source of cost pressure, since surging demand for AI hardware was pushing up memory-chip prices. The program is expected to cost roughly $650 million and yield about $1 billion in annual savings. These decisions, and the disappointing fiscal 2026 guidance that accompanied them, are the kind of operational risks a company would track in a formal risk register alongside supply-chain and demand exposure.

HP's printing business has drawn recurring legal and consumer criticism over practices that lock customers into HP-branded ink and toner. Firmware updates that block third-party cartridges, sometimes marketed under the "Dynamic Security" label, have prompted lawsuits and settlements over the years. The dispute is less about who owns HP than about how HP's most profitable segment treats the customers who own its printers, but it remains a persistent reputational and regulatory theme.

HP Inc.'s dispersed ownership shapes how the company behaves. With no controlling shareholder and a single class of stock, management is directly accountable to a broad institutional base that prizes steady cash returns. That is why HP consistently funnels billions into dividends and buybacks, and why activists and acquirers have periodically seen an opening to push for change. A founder-controlled company can ignore an unsolicited bid indefinitely. A widely held one like HP has to persuade its shareholders that the board's plan beats the alternative, as the Xerox fight showed.

The absence of a controlling block also makes HP a cleaner comparison for anyone studying how ownership structure affects strategy. Its chief PC rivals are owned very differently. A useful contrast is Dell's founder-controlled ownership, where Michael Dell and Silver Lake hold decisive sway, and Lenovo's state-linked ownership, anchored by a Chinese parent. HP sits at the opposite end of that spectrum, closer to a pure public float, which gives its board less insulation but also fewer conflicts of interest.

Ownership matters for the numbers, too. Because HP's value is set entirely by public markets rather than a negotiated private round, its market capitalization swings with quarterly results and PC-cycle sentiment. Investors trying to judge whether the roughly $28.9 billion market value is fair can weigh its steady free cash flow against the structural decline in printing, and can estimate its intrinsic value from those cash flows rather than relying on the market quote alone.

Finally, the shareholder base influences risk. HP's exposure to memory-chip inflation is a direct consequence of the same AI-hardware boom that has enriched suppliers, and understanding how Nvidia makes money helps explain why a PC maker's input costs are rising. For income-focused holders, HP's appeal rests heavily on its payout, which is why the stock's dividend yield is a core part of the ownership case.

As of February 2026, Bruce Broussard is serving as interim CEO. He is a board member and former CEO of Humana who took the role after Enrique Lores stepped down. The board is searching for a permanent chief executive, so this may change.

Yes. HP Inc. trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HPQ. It has been a public company for generations, first listing in 1957 as Hewlett-Packard and continuing as HP Inc. after the 2015 corporate split.

HP was founded in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in a rented garage in Palo Alto, California. Both founders have since died, and neither their estates nor their family foundations hold a controlling stake in HP Inc. today.

HP Inc.'s largest shareholders are institutional asset managers. The Vanguard Group is the biggest, at roughly 13.8% as of December 31, 2025, followed by BlackRock and State Street. These are mostly index-fund positions rather than active bets.

No. In 2015 the original Hewlett-Packard Company split into two separate public companies. HP Inc. (HPQ) makes PCs and printers. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) sells servers, networking, and enterprise services. They have different owners, boards, and management.

Yes, briefly. Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a roughly 11% stake in HP Inc. in April 2022, but it sold the position down starting in late 2023 and had exited entirely by early 2024. Berkshire is no longer a shareholder.