Alphabet Inc. (Google)

Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995. By 1996 they had built a search engine called BackRub — named after its method of analysing backlinks. It ran on Stanford's servers and consumed so much bandwidth that the university repeatedly asked them to take it down.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Google a cheque for $100,000 in August 1998 after a brief demo in a Stanford parking lot. There was one problem: Google Inc. didn't exist yet. Page and Brin had to incorporate the company before they could cash it.

In 1999, Page and Brin tried to sell Google to Excite CEO George Bell for $1 million. Bell turned them down — the search was too good, it would send users away from Excite's portal too quickly. Bell later called it the worst decision of his career. Excite filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

Google went public in August 2004 using an unusual Dutch auction process designed to cut out investment banks. The IPO price was $85. The S-1 filing included a letter warning investors that Google was not a conventional company and did not intend to become one. The stock tripled within two years.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Google declared an internal "code red." The company that had invented the transformer architecture had published the research paper that made ChatGPT possible — and was now scrambling to respond. Google rushed Bard to market. It made a factual error in its first public demo. The stock dropped $100 billion in a single day.