Facebook’s 2012 IPO raised about $16 billion — one of the largest in tech history — but the stock fell by roughly half within months before recovering and going on to multiply many times over.

Mark Zuckerberg’s official salary at Meta is $1. Nearly all of his reported pay is the cost of personal security — not compensation in the usual sense.

Google’s 2004 IPO was unusual: it used a Dutch auction to let ordinary investors bid directly, deliberately bypassing Wall Street’s usual practice of allocating shares to insiders.

Amazon went public in 1997 at $18 a share, raising about $54 million. The company that Wall Street doubted for years is now worth well over a trillion dollars.