On December 31, 1997, Apple stock was selling for 10 cents (yes cents) per share. Hard to believe I know, but don’t trust me. Look it up.
Last time I looked (Feb 7, 2025 closing), it’s selling for $273.63 per share. That’s means you could have bought 1,000 shares for a hundred bucks. Today, they’d be worth $273,630.00.
If you’d been a big spender and threw $1,000 at them on the reasonable expectation that it probably wouldn’t go to zero, you’d have an extra $2,7363,000.00, more if you automatically bought new shares with your dividends over the past twenty-eight years.
It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1997 Apple was circling the drain and a lot of people – practically everybody – thought they weren’t going to make it.
In my new book How the Web Won I talk about the time I was at dinner with Ed Niehaus and his family at a Japanese restaurant midway between our homes in the Fillmore district of SanFrancisco where I lived in the 1990s. Ed was CEO of Niehaus Ryan, the biggest world’s Internet PR company at the time. (Clients: Yahoo and AOL)
In the middle of dinner, he got a page. (It was the age of pagers back then. No cellphone and certainly no Smartphones.) It has a simple message: “Call me. Steve.” Steve Jobs was rounding up troops to take back and save Apple. (He’d been booted out by the idiot board many years earlier.)
I found this interview from what was THE lowest point in Apple’s history. Lots to learn from it. Most of all, if you keep your head, form a plan that makes sense, and hustle, you can move mountains.
For this and other stories about the rough and tumble days in the San Francisco of the 1990s, at the dawn of the Internet’s big breakout, see my book How the Web Won. You may find it inspiring and a source of useful guidance.
– Ken McCarthy
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