Google’s IPO took place on Thursday, August 19, 2004. Google offered 19,605,052 shares at an initial stock price of $85 each. The sale of 1.67 billion dollars at that IPO gave Google a market cap of over $23 billion dollars. (read more)

Google’s stock price performed positively after the IPO. Surging to $350 on October 31, 2007 as Google’s dominance in the advertising market began to grow. The stock price crashed back down below $150 during the stock market crash of 2008. However it rebounded and slowly grew again until the next major milestone in the history of Google’s stock price happened.

The three people who ran Google -- cofounder and CEO Larry Page, cofounder Sergey Brin, and chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt -- wanted to make sure they would have control of the company for a long time. They wanted to try and avoid what was happening at Yahoo in 2014, where an activist shareholder got upset and tried to install its own board members and influence strategy.

So on April 2, 2014 Google created an entirely new class of share and issued them to shareholders as a type of stock dividend. If someone owned one share of Google they would now get two shares of Google stock, and the price of each share will be half the price of the current shares. Essentially a 2 for 1 stock split. Except: unlike a normal stock split, half of the shares were a new class of shares called Class C. Which did not carry any voting rights. The other half are Class A which do get voting rights. Class B shares are owned by Brin, Page, Schmidt, and some other directors. A shares get one vote, C shares get none and B shares get 10 votes.

After the stock split both stocks continued to break records and hit all time highs. Today the company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1. These ticker symbols now refer to Alphabet Inc., Google`s holding company, since the fourth quarter of 2015

If you bought one share of Google in 2004 at its initial public offering price of $85, then it would be two shares worth over +1,500% today, taking into account Google`s stock split.