Google’s initial public offering price was $85. Taking into account Google’s stock split if you had just one share you would now have $1,575. A massive 1752.94% return!
If you had invested $10,000 you would now have $175,384. Nothing wrong with that :)
Obviously some employees made big money. Not sure if this is true, but apparently they were told not to buy BMW’s or they would get their windshields smashed. Very upsetting. If they checked the stock ticker at work they would have to buy the person who caught them 1 share. Hmmm, not as disturbing :)
If you had $100,000 of stock that would be valued at $1,853,022.60 now. That’s a 1753.02% return.
What about the Founders?
At the age of 43 Larry Page has a net worth of $38.7 Billion. He held the CEO position at Google until October 2015.
Sergey Brin has a net worth of $37.9 Billion. He’ll need to save his pennies to catch up to Larry. He runs Alphabet's (Google’s parent company) secretive X division.
How Google search has changed
On November 11th 1998 this was their fancy homepage.
This first link went to their ‘Search Engine Prototype’ page.
This second link went to their ‘Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype’ page.
May 8th 1999
Much more simplified version here.
July 11th 2000
Here they are looking for staff.
August 5th 2001
Not too many changes here.
July 7th 2002
Testing tabs.
June 13th 2003
Time for another tab.
July 7th 2004
No more tabs.
June 23rd 2005
They added ‘Google Local’.
August 20th 2006
This is when ‘Google Video’ was added.
May 17th 2007
Doesn’t look like there’s much happening at Google HQ :)
April 13th 2008
Let’s put the links up top.
July 26th 2009
Comics Themes were added.
July 8th 2010
Search settings were moved up to the top.
June 23rd 2011
Voice Search… where’s that when you need it?
June 13th 2012
Google+ comes on board.
May 18th 2013
It’s getting more popular to use mobile for searching.
June 14th 2014
It’s World Cup time.
June 10th 2016
Pushing Google Chrome.
19th August 2016
Exactly 12 years after the IPO. In support of the Olympics.
Great post. I remember the days we all used Altavista. Had I bought some Google stocks in those days...
Thanks, back then Altavista as well