If you bought one share of Alphabet stock at the IPO, here’s how many shares you would own now

This year marks twenty years Alphabet (GOOGL 0.30%) (GOOG 0.33%)then known as Google, Inc., launched its initial public offering. The company faced significant regulatory scrutiny at the time, and its desire to launch its IPO at a higher price gave way to pressure, causing the IPO price to drop to a split-adjusted $2.13 per share.

Despite such challenges, the company developed into a digital advertising giant, and the profits generated from that business led to Alphabet acquiring numerous other companies. With that expansion, even an investor with one pre-split stock has made huge profits over the past twenty years.

Alphabet’s stock growth

Investors who bought one share in 2004 would now own 40 shares: 20 voting shares under the ‘GOOGL’ symbol and 20 non-voting shares trading under the ‘GOOG’ symbol.

This is because the company initiated an unusual 2-for-1 stock split in 2014 when it created a third class of non-voting shares (only insiders own the second class of shares, known as “B” shares). Additionally, in 2022, each Alphabet share class was split 20-to-1, leading to the shares’ current weighting.

Consequently, this stake in Alphabet would have produced a total return of just under $6,700 today, including the dividend that began in the second quarter of 2024.

An important lesson from Alphabet’s IPO

Granted, those gains might be disappointing compared to the lifetime gains of Amazonof which one share at the 1997 IPO is now worth about $34,000.

However, Amazon’s market cap at the time was only about $450 million, meaning it had already doubled about six times by the time it reached Alphabet’s IPO market cap of about $27 billion.

This distinction is important because companies today tend to launch IPOs when they have already achieved large-cap status. Nevertheless, the example of Alphabet shows that it is not too late to realize significant profits from such a market capitalization. If you can apply these lessons to a future leader in the tech industry, huge returns are still possible.