YouTube’s founders split over $650 million when they sold to Google in 2006—had they held out, they could have taken a slice of $550 billion

• YouTube sold to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, with cofounders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen splitting over $650 million worth of stock shares. And while their wealth increased exponentially with the acquisition, estimates put today’s value of YouTube at $550 billion—a 333x increase. Few could imagine YouTube’s eventual media dominance at the time, making it a classic example of the high-stakes decisions founders must weigh. 

YouTube may have started as a site to share home videos, but now it’s one of the most powerful platforms in the world: From entertainment to advertising, it’s spawned billion-dollar careers and birthed a global creator economy, turning individuals like MrBeast into household names.

But when its founders sold the popular video platform to Google for $1.65 billion in fall 2006, not even they could have predicted just how massive it would become—or how much more they could have made.