It was both: https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/

"In a remarkable feat of negotiating legerdemain, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs got needed cash — in return for non-voting shares — and an assurance that Microsoft would support Office for the Mac for five years. Apple agreed to drop a long-running lawsuit in which they alleged Microsoft copied the look and feel of the Mac OS for Windows and to make Internet Explorer the default browser on its computers — but not the only choice."

How can you be so sure about that? Many otherwise very viable companies go bust because of current account issues. $250m is a lot of current account.

Microsoft paid $150 million, not $250 million. And Apple had $1.2 billion in cash at the time, so they weren't on the brink of bankruptcy, just headed that way. It looks as if Apple would have won its patent infringement case against Microsoft, since there were thousands of lines of quicktime code found in Windows media player (probably added by mistake, but even so...). That was a smart deal by Apple, dropping the infringement suit, because Microsoft pledged to develop Office for Macs. No Office, no Mac sales to businesses. There was a time when Macs couldn't open Word .doc files, not with formatting intact, so it was an incredible barrier to communication.