In 1999, Bonnie Brown’s life was in free fall. After two decades of marriage, a sudden divorce left her emotionally drained, financially unmoored, and sleeping on her sister’s couch in the Bay Area. She had just shuttered the day school she’d run for ten years, sold her house, and held what she called “the garage sale to end all garage sales.” For the first month of her new life, she barely got out of bed.
Eventually, Bonnie scraped together $100 for a massage table, got certified, and began taking clients. It wasn’t glamorous, and it definitely wasn’t lucrative — but it was something. She handed out flyers, made house calls, and hoped her luck might turn. One day, by total chance, she heard about a tiny local tech company looking to hire an in-house masseuse. It would be a part-time gig that paid $450 a week.
The company had a weird name and just 40 employees. Its business had something to do with “search engines,” a term Bonnie didn’t understand at all. It wasn’t profitable — not even close. In fact, 1999 was the company’s first year generating revenue, pulling in a grand total of $220,000.
All of which is to say: this was a risky job for Bonnie to take. Any reasonable person might assume this flailing startup would go bankrupt at any moment. Undeterred, Bonnie showed up every day, massaging the hunched shoulders of stressed-out engineers. What she didn’t realize was that she had just taken a front-row seat to one of the most explosive wealth-creation events in modern history. For her as well…
As you may have guessed, that little flailing search engine startup was Google.
Bonnie didn’t fully understand what Google did, but the company’s energy was contagious. The office was loud and weird and buzzing with ambition. Engineers worked around the clock, often crashing at their desks. The fridge was stocked with Odwalla juices. Meetings happened on yoga balls. Bonnie’s job was simple: loosen the knots in their backs so they could keep coding.
Ironically, Bonnie wasn’t even the hiring manager’s first choice, but as fate would have it, their top choice declined. So Bonnie got the gig. To reiterate, it was a part-time job, and the pay was $450 per week.
But there was a perk. Bonnie was also given a few thousand shares in Google stock options.
At the time, Bonnie didn’t think much of the options. She thought they were “just pieces of paper,” and most of her friends advised her to cash out if she ever could.
Going Public
Google went public on August 19, 2004. The price per share at the end of the first day of trading was $85. This was the moment Bonnie’s life changed forever. She was one of an estimated 600 Googlers who were millionaires overnight after the IPO. Her financial advisor insisted she sell her shares as soon as humanly possible to ring the register on what must have been a total fluke. If she did want to sell, she would have to wait six months. Six months later, a single share of Google was trading for $100. Her advisor again insisted she sell.
She refused.
When Bonnie was interviewed by the New York Times in 2007, she wouldn’t say exactly how much she was worth, but she did confirm she was a “multi-multi-millionaire.“
What Could Be Today
For fun, let’s hypothetically assume Bonnie never sold a single share. What would she be worth today?
To calculate, remember that in November 2007, Bonnie said she was a “multi-multi-millionaire.” Let’s assume she was worth $5 million. At the time, Google stock was trading at around $700 a share (pre-split). Therefore, to be worth $5 million, she would have owned 7,143 shares. Google has had two stock splits:
- 2014: 2-for-1 → 7,143 becomes 14,286
- 2022: 20-for-1 → 14,286 becomes 285,714 shares
As I type this article Google trades at $155 per share. Therefore, under this hypothetical scenario, today Bonnie would be worth $44,285,670. And that’s AFTER Google has been battered down in the last few months. On January 31, 2025, Google hit an all-time high of $205.60 per share. At that level, Bonnie’s stake was worth $58,742,798. Hypothetically 🙂
FRANCK FIFE/AFP/Getty Images
How She Spent It
She retired after five years at the company, perhaps the wealthiest masseuse in history. So what did Brown do with her newfound wealth? She bought a 3,000-square-foot dream home in Nevada. When she’s home, she gets weekly massages. She’s traveled the world and she started a charitable foundation. In 2008, she also self-published a memoir about her experience called “Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google.”
Before the book and the traveling, though, one of the first things Brown did with her money was pay off her bills. “One of the greatest feelings in life is to be debt-free.”
“It seems that every time I give some [money] away, it just keeps filling up again,” Brown told The New York Times in 2007. “It’s like an overflowing pot.“
So what’s the lesson here? If a bunch of really smart nerds offer you shares in their unknown company, accept the offer AND HOLD ON FOREVER!
She Wasn’t Alone
Bonnie isn’t the only non-technical person who took a job at Google in 1999 and ended up becoming a millionaire. The 56th person hired by Google was a guy named Charlie Ayers. Charlie was chef who had previously cooked meals for the Grateful Dead
In 1999, ignoring the advice and protestations of his friends and family, Charlie Ayers gave up a relatively stable life touring with rock stars to become the corporate chef for a tiny startup called Google. Like Bonnie, Charlie was given 40,000 options in the privately held company.
When Charlie was profiled by MSNBC in 2007, he had not sold a single share. At that point, his stake was worth $26 million.
Just for fun, let’s assume Charlie never sold a single share. At the first stock split in 2014, 40,000 shares became 80,000. In July 2022, Google split 20:1, turning 80,000 shares into 1.6 million shares. As I type this article, Google’s stock price is $155. Just for fun, let’s pretend Charlie still holds his shares Today, his 1.6 million shares would be worth…
