Here's How Much Investing $1,000 In Amazon's IPO Would Be Worth Today

On May 15, 1997, Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN held its initial public offering. In the past 23 years, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY is up 236%, but it’s safe to say Amazon IPO investors have done much, much better.

Amazon’s Transformation

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in July of 1994. At the time of its IPO, Amazon was essentially an online bookstore valued at just $438 million.

Today, Amazon is one of the largest online retailers in the world. Over the years, Amazon has morphed from an online bookstore to a one-stop shopping destination for pretty much anything under the sun. Not only has amazon expanded its business overseas, it has also aggressively built its AWS cloud services business into the market leader and one of its strongest growth engines in recent years.

Amazon had three stock splits in the late 1990s following its IPO, so all the prices mentioned below are on a split-adjusted basis.

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Incredibly, Amazon’s IPO shares were priced at just $1.50. Amazon quickly made its all-time low of $1.3125 within months of its initial listing before taking off as the dot com bubble exploded. Amazon reached its dot-com bubble peak of $113 in late 1999.

When the bubble burst, Amazon lost roughly 95% of its value, trading down to as low as $5.51 by late 2001. From there, the shares took off again, eclipsing their dot com bubble highs in late 2009 and never looking back.

2020 And Beyond

Amazon hit the $1,000 mark in 2017 and reached its all-time high of 2,475 just last month.

Despite cooling down a bit since then, the popular e-commerce stock has been without a doubt one of the best IPO investments of all time.

In fact, $1,000 worth of Amazon IPO stock in 1997 would be worth more than $1.58 million today.

Meanwhile, Bezos has become the richest person in the world, with a net worth of about $145 billion.

Looking ahead, analysts expect more upside from Amazon in 2020. The average price target among the 45 analysts covering the stock is $2,700 suggesting 13.8% upside from current levels.