6 November 2013: Twitter prices its IPO at $26
Twitter priced its initial public offering at $26 a share, raising about $1.8 billion. The next day the stock opened far higher and closed its first session at $44.90, up about 73 percent. Investors who bought at the open paid dearly: the company struggled for years to turn reliable profits, and the shares spent long stretches below that first-day price before Elon Musk bought it in 2022.
The lesson: A hot first trading day tells you about demand, not about the business.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Twitter at the start of 2015 → $1,506 today, vs $3,301 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2015, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 1.5 times the money, but $1,795 less than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Twitter teaches: Merger contracts matter; Twitter shareholders were paid a premium largely because the company's lawyers had written a deal that the buyer could not easily escape.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $36.00 | $1,506 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $24.00 | $2,258 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $32.00 | $1,694 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Twitter? Every starting year and the full story →
More Twitter history
- 21 March 2006: Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet
- 15 July 2006: Twitter opens to the public
- 27 July 2018: Twitter follows Facebook off a cliff
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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