A $500 Investment in Amazon’s IPO Would Be Worth This Today

In immoderate ways, it’s hard to ideate the satellite without Amazon. With implicit 310 cardinal progressive customers and millions of items sold each day, according to AMZ Scout, the large corp is profoundly embedded successful the lives of many.

Today, Amazon enjoys the presumption arsenic the world’s fifth-largest company, according to Forbes. But each institution starts somewhere, adjacent Amazon. If you had invested astatine the beginning, you’d person rather a batch of money. We research precisely however overmuch and however it performed comparative to the market.

The institution went nationalist backmost connected May 15, 1997, according to institution records.

It entered the marketplace with an IPO terms of $18 per share. Since then, it has divided 4 times. When you origin successful these splits, the adjusted outgo of the IPO is $0.075 per share. In different words, each azygous IPO stock has been converted into 240 shares today.

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As of the adjacent of concern connected Dec. 29, 2025, Amazon’s banal terms was $232.07 per share, according to Yahoo! Finance.

At archetypal glance, considering the $18 archetypal stock price, Amazon’s stock terms has grown by much than 1,000%. But since it’s much due to see Amazon’s split-adjusted IPO price, the returns go genuinely staggering.

When you see the split-adjusted stock terms of $0.075 astatine the clip of the IPO, Amazon’s banal has accrued by 301,607%. That’s an astonishing instrumentality for immoderate investor.

If you had invested $500 successful Amazon’s IPO and held it for the past twenty-seven years, your Amazon banal would beryllium worthy astir $1,508,535.

Surprised that Amazon’s IPO worth seems comparatively low? Back successful 1997, Amazon was chiefly an online bookstore attempting to beryllium itself arsenic an e-commerce alternate to accepted brick-and-mortar stores. In 1996, the company’s yearly filings were astir $16 million, according to SEC filing documents. While immoderate surely saw immoderate imaginable successful Amazon, galore didn’t drawback connected to the genius of its e-commerce aspirations until overmuch later.

Over the years, Amazon has expanded to make an awesome logistics web that gets items to customers quickly. Beyond e-commerce, Amazon has branched retired to supply different services, similar its media streaming level and Amazon Web Services.

On May 15, 1997, the S&P 500 closed astatine $836.04 per share, according to Yahoo! Finance. As of marketplace adjacent connected Dec. 29, 2025, the S&P 500 reached a worth of $6,905.74, according to CNBC. That represents an awesome instrumentality of 700% for S&P 500 investors betwixt May 1997 and today. But that’s not adjacent adjacent to the returns offered to Amazon’s archetypal postulation of investors implicit the aforesaid clip period.