Ah, 2004. Michael Phelps was doing his thing, winning medals while we all pretended to care about swimming. “Lean Back” was blaring through every speaker as though it was important. Meanwhile, some two-bit company called Google decided to throw its hat into the stock market ring with a modest little IPO. At the time, nobody knew that this quirky search engine company, later to be known as Alphabet (you know, for no particular reason), would go on to disrupt absolutely everything. Well, almost everything.
But let’s get back to that original $10,200 investment. The one you could have made when Google went public. If you’d put that money in back then and kept your hands off the keyboard, you’d have a cool million today. But here’s the question: Is Alphabet still that “make a millionaire” kind of stock, or did the party end with the 2010s?
The Long, Meandering Road to $1 Million
Back in 1996, two Stanford kids – Sergey Brin and Larry Page – had a problem to solve. They didn’t want to look up stuff on AltaVista, so they built Google. It worked. By 1998, it was everywhere. By 2004, the company controlled the internet’s search engine scene. And that was only the beginning. They quickly monetized their brainchild, making gobs of cash from ads. Ads, it turns out, are a pretty lucrative business, if you’re willing to sell people’s attention to the highest bidder.
By the time it was 2004 and the world had begun waking up to the fact that Google was more than a search engine – it was a full-on tech ecosystem – the company had its fingers in everything. Gmail, Chrome, YouTube, Android, Google Maps… You name it. They even bought DoubleClick in 2007, which let them start running ads on other people’s websites. But hey, it’s all part of the plan. Because ads. Always ads.
Then came the cloud. Google Cloud, launched in 2008, right on the coattails of Amazon’s Web Services. Fast forward to today, and Google Cloud is growing at the speed of a runaway train, contributing a tidy 14% of Alphabet’s revenue. They might not be Amazon in the cloud game, but they sure know how to play it well enough.
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Could Alphabet Still Be That Millionaire-Maker Stock?
Now, let’s talk numbers. Alphabet’s market cap is sitting at a cozy $3 trillion. If you’re thinking about turning $10,000 into $1 million, then that would require Alphabet to somehow grow to a mind-boggling $300 trillion. And let’s not sugarcoat it: that’s not happening. It’s not probable. It’s not even possible. But don’t worry. Keep daydreaming.
That said, if you’ve got a nice chunk of cash (say, $100,000), and you’re looking to ride the next big wave of tech – AI, AGI, quantum computing, self-driving cars – then maybe, just maybe, you could hit the million-dollar mark in the next 20 years. That’s a big maybe. Alphabet is in a good position, but don’t bet the house on it. The promise is there, but so it goes.
And so, the stock market goes on. Alphabet will likely continue to profit from every new technological marvel it introduces, and you, dear investor, might just cash in if you’re patient enough to outlast the market’s inevitable dips and crashes. 🍀
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2025-09-26 10:48