Well GOOG added $36 billion dollars of market cap overnight. To put that into perspective that is 9 BBRYs (RIMM), 1.5 TSLA's, 1.5 LNKD's, or 0.5 UNP's (Union Pacific).

How come LNKD is so expensive?

LNKD is expensive because it participates in the social-networking stock bubble.

Share price is hardly meaningless. Most people (correctly, i might add) think in term of relative movement of the share price, since that is the easiest one to track. In fact, as the second line of the article says: "Shares in the giant online search and ads company rose more than 13% to $1,006, and are now up 41% since the start of 2013." Such a big jump in a big company is what makes this really newsworthy.

Also impressive is the market capitalization per permanent employee: $337B/46,421 = $7.3 M per employee.

I don't think stock splits usually result in "X stock price plummets by 50%" headlines.

I don't think this is what he was insinuating either.

Nobody is denying this. It's an all-time high for this company. Where do you see people claiming that the $1k number is meaningful on its own?

$1000 is meaningful on its own but not for the reasons most of these comments think: it's an awkwardly large amount to pay for a single share, and an even more awkwardly large amount to pay for a standard option.

Standard options are contracts of 100 shares, so that's $100,000 covered by a single option, which at current prices are about $2,500 each. This puts it out of the realm of small time investors, which is why GOOG is one of the few options available as "mini": 10 share contracts. Even at mini it's damn expensive per option.

I wouldn't be surprised if they split the stock at some point soon.

Indeed. I wanted to buy 'in-the-money' options not so long ago. When I did the math, I just decided to let it go and check for a cheaper stock.

Especially if you wanted to do a simple covered-call, e.g:

  * Buy 100 GOOG at $1000.
  * Sell 1 Nov 16 $1050 Call.

(Edit: Then assuming GOOG doesn't go down significantly it's a profit even if assigned)

Normally that would be a relatively low risk position, but you'd need $100,000 in GOOG underlying to cover it, which is a rather large amount for small investors to throw around even with margin accounts. And that's just for ONE option.

Edit: Oh, and if you thought $1000 is annoying to trade, check out Berkshire Hathaway:

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:BRK.A

$175,400 per share.

> Oh, and if you thought $1000 is annoying to trade, check out Berkshire Hathaway:

If you want to trade Berkshire Hathaway, you're supposed to trade the B shares -- not the A shares.

Berkshire A usually trades under a thousand shares per day. Even on a market-value basis, this is still much lower than the B shares.

As far as I can see GOOG has never split?