What if you bought Google / Alphabet in 2005?
US Tech · Internet. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play41.7× · S&P 500 same money: $5,763
$1,000 in Google / Alphabet at the start of 2005 would be worth about $41,667 today — 41.7 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Google went public in 2004 through an unusual Dutch auction, with founders who warned investors they would not run the company for quarterly results. They did not need to: search advertising turned out to be perhaps the best business model the internet produced, a toll on human curiosity priced by auction. YouTube was bought in 2006 and Android in 2005, and the shares climbed fast until the 2008 crisis cut them roughly in half.
The following years were steady rather than spectacular. In 2015 the company reorganised as Alphabet, separating search, YouTube and cloud from the moonshots such as Waymo. A US court ruled in 2024 that Google had illegally maintained a search monopoly, though the remedies decided in 2025 stopped well short of a break-up. The arrival of ChatGPT raised the question of whether chatbots would eat search; Alphabet answered with Gemini and its own AI chips. A buyer in 2005 multiplied their money roughly fortyfold, mostly by doing nothing.
The lesson: Owning a toll road on a growing activity can be enough; Alphabet's search monopoly kept compounding through crises, lawsuits and repeated predictions of its disruption.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | $4.80 | $41,667 | $5,763 | 41.7× |
| 2007 | $12.00 | $16,667 | $4,789 | 16.7× |
| 2008 | $17.00 | $11,765 | $4,626 | 11.8× |
| 2010 | $15.00 | $13,333 | $6,071 | 13.3× |
| 2012 | $16.00 | $12,500 | $5,312 | 12.5× |
| 2015 | $26.00 | $7,692 | $3,301 | 7.7× |
| 2018 | $55.00 | $3,636 | $2,519 | 3.6× |
| 2020 | $68.00 | $2,941 | $2,092 | 2.9× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2005, turning $1,000 into $41,667. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,763.
On this day
- 12 January 2010: Google threatens to leave China
- 29 April 2004: Google files to go public, Dutch auction and all
- 10 August 2015: Google reorganizes itself as Alphabet
- 19 August 2004: Google goes public by auction
- 4 September 1998: Google is incorporated
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Google / Alphabet is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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