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Here's the crew at the IPO. Cofounder Sergey Brin stayed in Mountain View that Day because he didn't want to take a red-eye flight ot New York
In the immediate aftermath, employees who made big money were warned not to buy BMWs (or else they'd get their windshields smashed) or check the stock ticker at work (or else they'd have to buy the person who caught them a share).
People who bought shares on August 19, 2004, and kept it have made off well, as the stock price of Google and new parent company Alphabet has skyrocketed.
If you bought one share of Google in 2004 at its initial public offering price of $85, it would be two shares worth $1,575 today, taking into account Google's stock split.
That's a stunning $1,752.94% change, or about 18.5x.
So, let's assume that you bought more than one share:
If you bought ~$1,000 of stock (~11.76 shares) at the IPO price in 2004, you'd have ~$18,522 today.
If you'd invested $10,000, you'd have $185,384.53, a gain of $175,384.
If you'd been high-rolling with a $100,000 investment, you'd have a stunning $1,853,022.60.
Not too shabby.
Although the company has changed tremendously in the past 12 years - there are now separate divisions for self-driving cars, curing death, and improving cities - the core search experience looks pretty much the same.
Thanks to $4, we can revisit those early days and see exactly what Google used to look like: