Originally published at: If you spent $399.99 on Apple stock instead of an iPod in 2001, you'd now have $9,217,922 | Boing Boing
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Well, I haven’t. Don’t rub it in. I’m not exactly fin-savvyz anyways.
Also, the price of that stock is obscene.
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That’s not even counting dividends paid out over the past couple decades.
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Yeah, thanks, I don’t even have four hundred bucks now.
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For reference, that’s the equivalent of spending $669.30 today. You’d have to be pretty comfortable to have the surplus income or wealth to take a flyer like that on stock in what was then still a somewhat distressed tech company (thanks to Scully and Amelio) in the midst of the dotcom bust and then hold it for two decades.
A lot of Americans are in the same boat.
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Wish I could trade in the permanent crook in my neck caused by looking at my damn phone for nine million bucks. Don’t blame Jobs for that though. I wonder what he’d have to say about the state of things right now regarding the digital revolution and its influence on the culture. He really did die too young.
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I don’t think the math is right. That 34¢ a share is the split-adjusted price, so your calculations do the 56:1 split twice.
Share price at that time would have been $19.04 (.34x56), meaning that the number you started your calculations with (1175) is the number you’d have today after all the splits. So you’d have $164,500. Still not a bad investment from $400, but nowhere near $9 million.
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My dad had the option to buy xerox stock for 25$ back in 1965ish, and declined because he did think the machine had many applications. A smart guy, but sometimes just wrong.
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He’d have just told you you were holding it wrong anyway.
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Alternate timeline: everyone who wanted to buy the original iPod instead spends the money of Apple stock. iPod is considered a commercial failure, Apple stocks tank, everybody loses.
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Thanks for this.
For those of us who are not “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” but ordinary working people who still look into our mirrors every day to meet our own gaze, I say this: don’t buy this “I could been a zillionaire if” narrative.
Media exposés at first were integral to shedding light on rights violations at Foxconn and raising awareness. But this has not been enough. Apple’s rights violations have been widely reported over the years, and despite some improvements, these have clearly been limited. Negative media reporting takes a very targeted approach. Where Apple acknowledges that conditions have fallen short of its standards, the company merely addresses the factory in question, rather than making wholesale improvements in the supply chain.
The food items that were given to the workers were infested with rats, food safety inspectors who visited the facility following the protests revealed. Due to the contaminated food, over 150 women workers were hospitalised. The hospitalisation of workers because of inedible food led to the protests.
The Reuters were informed by the Thiruvallur district administration about the mass food poisoning incident among Foxconn workers on December 15. As per the administration, a total of 159 women from a single dorm were hospitalised on the day due to food poisoning. While 100 more sought medical attention but were not hospitalised. The rumours of some workers dying after consuming contaminated food were also doing the rounds.
However, this was not an uncommon site in Foxconn. It was reported that workers fell ill repeatedly due to the unhygienic atmosphere they were inhabiting.
Austin, Texas is aswarm with tech bros who have fully bought in to the “get rich at any price” bs, and today we see the predictable negative impacts to our once lovely town. Obscene inequities in society create injustices that get baked into its culture as oligarchs end up controlling the joint. Worship of wealth is a death cult tenet.
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$9,217,922 in 2022
Wow, that’s almost enough for a new iPod.
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I never worry too much about missing out on these gains. If I’d dropped $400 on Apple stock, I might have let it get to $4,000, sold it and declared myself a genius.
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After digging deeper, you’re right, I totaled missed that part. This is sort of embarrassing, but I’ll let it stand as a lesson for better writing! Thanks for pointing out my error, that final 9.2 mill really kicked me in the guts, and I had felt like a heel for obvious reasons. Thanks again, now I’ve got a funny story about “my worst writing error.”
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Sorry if I made your story 1/56th as interesting!
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The people who did buy an iPod are doing fairly well on their investment as well, assuming that they never opened the factory-sealed box:
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LOL, the “1/56th” had me literally laughing out loud!!! 
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Pedantry is never uninteresting.
Mmmmmm, facts…
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I guess if I never bought computing devices and only invested in stocks I would have more money - although it might end up being a wash if I bought non-apple stocks or if Apple had gone down.
But 10k isn’t a life-changing amount of money, and not enough to never experience an iPod or a computer ever again and only invest in stocks. Being computer and device literate helped me have the tech job I have now.
I do feel a bit silly to have read about bitcoin in 2012 and not bought a little for fun and be rich now - but being in the top of a ponzi scheme is also a moral question.
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Yes. As someone who does own some Apple shares since around that time, I most certainly don’t have anywhere near $9 million!
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