Well, if you become part owner, perhaps you'll have some pull. I think I may have heard something (e.g. front page banner headlines in the Merc) about some sort of public offering.
- mark 5-03-2004 9:13 am

D'oh. I guess I could buy one on ebay.
- jim 5-03-2004 5:36 pm

How the google geeks priced their IPO:

Wow! Reading Bambi Francisco's CBS MarketWatch article, I see that Google chose to raise $2,718,281,828 in their IPO. Why such an irrational (wink, wink) number?

It turns out that 2.718281828... (...and an infinite number of digits after that) is 'e', the base of the natural logarithm. Because it can't be expressed as a ratio of two numbers, it's known mathematically as "irrational" -- something some bankers might say about the way Google is going public. However, 'e' also happens to be "transcendental," another fancy property of a number that means it can't be expressed by a finite number of algebraic operations. Maybe Google is making a little wordplay -- saying they expect to transcend expectations -- to overcome or notably exceed ordinary limits.