Google, the search engine and technology giant, is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG.
The road to Google’s IPO was an interesting one: in 1999, Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to sell the company to Excite. They approached Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell Google to him for $1 million. Bell rejected the offer. Excite could have had Google for even cheaper, after one of Excite’s venture capitalists talked Bin and Page down to $750,000. Bell still rejected the offer.
Five years later in 2004, the company went public. At the time, Page, Brin and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for another 20 years, until 2024.
What was Google originally valued at?
At the initial public listing, Google offered 19,605,052 shares at $85 per share. Google sold $1.67 billion in stock and achieved a market cap of more than $23bn. By 2014, this market cap had grown to an astonishing $397bn. The majority of shares in Google were retained by the company and its employees, with many who worked at Google becoming instant paper millionaires went the company went public.
Interestingly – a major rival of Google, Yahoo, also benefited from the IPO, as it owned 8.4 million Google shares before the IPO.
Google stock price performed well after the IPO, with shares hitting $350 for the first time on October 31 2007.
What is Google’s stock price now?
Now (as of October 2022), the price of Google shares is fourteen times that of 2009, valued at around $1,800. The company has cemented its place as the undisputed search engine of choice and has expanded its business into cloud computing, AI, software as a service and even mobile phones.
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