sharethestock

The company story

Alphabet Inc.

XNAS: GOOGL · USD · split-adjusted

The best business model ever invented, defending itself for twenty years.

Google printed money from intent before anyone knew what to call it. Its stock chart is the record of a moat so good that the threats kept arriving and the margins kept expanding anyway.

$2.56first monthly close, Aug 2004 $340.92latest, Sep 29, 2026 +13207.77%since Aug 2004 $1,000 → $133,077.69first close to now
  1. 1The auctionAug 2004 – Dec 2008+200.53%
  2. 2The operating systemJan 2009 – Jul 2015+288.06%
  3. 3AlphabetAug 2015 – Dec 2021+347.20%
  4. 4The code redJan 2022 – Sep 2026+151.97%

Search wins the web

A Dutch-auction IPO at $85 looked expensive to half of Wall Street. Within four years the company owned the most profitable placement in the history of advertising — and bought YouTube before anyone understood what it was.

  1. IPO at $85, by auctionMarket

    The founders sell shares through a public auction and attach a letter telling Wall Street to expect unconventional management. Adjusted for splits, about $2.10.

    Closed $2.56 that month

  2. YouTube for $1.65BDeal

    Called a lawsuit magnet and a joke about cats. It becomes the second most-watched screen in the world.

    Closed $11.92 that month

  3. Chrome, then Android goes liveProduct

    A browser and a phone OS launch within weeks of each other — both free, both designed to keep Google on the default screen position.

    Closed $10.02 that month

  4. The first real drawdownCrisis

    The financial crisis halves the stock anyway. Search spend turns out to be the last budget item companies cut — and the first to return.

    Closed $7.70 that month

Android and the second front

Google gave away a mobile OS to keep search default on the next billion screens. Analysts called it expensive paranoia; it turned out to be the moat’s outer wall.

Reorganised around the cash machine

The holding-company split admitted what was already true: search funds the experiments. Margins dipped under cloud spending, then the machine compounded through a pandemic.

  1. Google becomes AlphabetMarket

    The reorg separates the machine that makes money from the projects that spend it. The stock jumps on the promise of disclosure.

    Closed $32.39 that month

  2. The cloud pivot gets seriousProduct

    Diane Greene’s enterprise rebuild starts shipping. Cloud goes from an embarrassing third place to a real business — slowly, expensively.

    Closed $51.65 that month

  3. DOJ files the antitrust caseCrisis

    The default-payment deals that funded a decade of Apple’s profits become the government’s central evidence. The stock barely notices — the first of several times.

    Closed $80.81 that month

ChatGPT asks the question Google was built to answer

For the first time in two decades, search itself looked attackable, and the stock priced a dead moat. Then Gemini, TPU silicon, and a lenient antitrust remedy repriced it as an AI winner — twice.

  1. ChatGPT ships; Google calls a code redCrisis

    A chatbot built on Google’s own transformer paper becomes the fastest-growing product in history. For a year, the market prices search as a melting glacier.

    Closed $100.99 that month

  2. The Bard fumbleCrisis

    A wrong answer in a demo video erases $100B in a day — the market punishing panic, not the product.

    Closed $90.06 that month

  3. Search ruled a monopolyCrisis

    Judge Mehta finds Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search. The feared remedy — losing the default deals — does not arrive.

    Closed $163.38 that month

  4. The remedy lands softMarket

    No breakup, defaults survive with new rules, Chrome stays. The stock rallies to records as Gemini 3 lands months later to reviews the market can measure.

    Closed $243.10 that month

The whole arc

+13207.77% in 22 years

One chart, Aug 31, 2004 – Sep 29, 2026. Open it, drag a range, add your own markers — or take this card with you.