LinkedIn's CEO and founder is Reid Hoffman, formerly an executive vice president at PayPal and formerly a senior executive at Intuit Software. He founded LinkedIn with some college friends after eBay sold it.

LinkedIn was founded in December 2002 and launched in 2003, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California, USA. The company went public in the U.S. on May 20, 2011. As of May 2020, LinkedIn has reached a total of more than 690 million users.

On June 13, 2016, Microsoft's official blog announced that Microsoft and LinkedIn Corporation have entered into a definitive agreement for Microsoft to acquire all of the equity and net cash including LinkedIn for $196 per share, or $26.2 billion in total. In 2017 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands, LinkedIn Technologies ranked 79th with $13.594 billion. In October 2019, Interbrand released its Top 100 Global Brands list ranked 98.