LESSON > Most People Would Laugh At A Stock Priced At .06 Cents / Share
 

Google Stake To Pay Off Big For Amazon Chairman Bezos

Amazon.com Inc. Chairman Jeff Bezos, ranked by Forbes magazine in February as the world's 82nd-richest person, stands to move up a notch or two when Google Inc. holds its initial public offering later this year.

Google, operator of the most widely used search engine on the Internet, disclosed in a securities filing that Bezos was one of the company's first five outside investors. The group, which also includes former Amazon.com executive Ram Shriram, paid 6 cents a share for Google stock in late 1998, according to the documents.

Bezos, 40, already has built a personal fortune of $5.1 billion, according to Forbes, by turning Seattle-based Amazon.com into the world's largest online retailer. He is set to reap further rewards as Google prepares to raise $2.7 billion through its IPO, a record first-time stock sale for an Internet company.

"You have to give Bezos credit for vision," said Benjamin Horowitz, chief executive of Opsware Inc., a software provider he set up with Marc Andreessen, one of the co-founders of Netscape Communications Corp. "Who would have thought in 1998 that the next big thing would be Internet search?"

Google officials declined comment and Amazon.com officials declined to make Bezos available for an interview.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google sold 15.36 million Series A shares, for a total of $960,000, shortly after the company incorporated in September 1998, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 29. Bezos was cited in an exhibit to the SEC filing as one of five investors who owned the Series A preferred stock. The document doesn't disclose the number of shares Bezos holds.

Based on data in the filing, Google has a current stock market value of as much as $25 billion, or about $91 a share, according to estimates provided to The Wall Street Journal by Jack Ciesielski, publisher of Analyst's Accounting Observer.

That would represent a 1,500-fold return for the Series A investors, who will be able to convert their preferred stock into an equivalent number of common shares, according to the SEC filing.

That's a pretty damn solid return ! :thumbsup

So the moral of the story is that I should buy every 6 cent stock I can find. Quick. Loan me a shitload of money!

For every 6 cent stock that yields a 1800x return there are too many to count that get you nothing but perhaps a piece of paper you can mount on the wall to remind you that penny stocks are sky high risk.

That being said, Jeff Bezos is one sharp muthafuka.

Agreed, but the point was you should always at least look if one comes your way and not just brush it off without reading the prospectus just cause its priced so in the pennies.

That must be one of the best investments ever.

www.a9.com :glugglug

I get the feeling though with only 5 listed investors of class A shares, that this deal wasnt exactly something the everyday Joe was able to get in on. Seems that way with alot of initial offerings of stock. VC firms have the inside track to buy up all that is offered. Makes me suspicious if it gets down to the avg investor as I start to wonder why the smart money in the biz took a pass on XYZ company.

Course, I'm the kinda guy that will just give my dough to Vanguard to watch over with some low fees and indexing, so my input on penny stocks is worth as much as used toilet paper.

What he said.

Damn, I've never used it before... but the "open book results" area SWEET! I've read about it, but I just performed my fist search :)

I don't thing I was even using google back in 98. I think I was still using Altavista

Before I found Google I was using alltheweb.com

wow some people have all the luck

luck isnt the right word

I don't call that luck, I call it vision.
WG

I used to use webcrawler.com, then hotbot.com. I think I switched to Google when all the other engines turned to spam around 98 or 99.