The search engine giant, Google, launched their IPO on 19th August 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. This gave the company a market capitalisation of $23 billion. The majority of the company shares were held by Google and its employees, which meant most of them became instant millionaires. At that time, Yahoo!, the competitor of Google, held 8.4 million shares of the company and also benefitted tremendously from the IPO.
