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

You Tube 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 You Tube at $550 billion—a 333x increase. Few could imagine You Tube’s eventual media dominance at the time, making it a classic example of the high-stakes decisions founders must weigh. You Tube 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. At the time of sale, each cofounder—Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim—received millions of dollars worth of stock: Hurley, YouTube’s CEO at the time, received shares worth some $345 million by the time the Securities and Exchange Commission documents were released a few months later, according to The New York Times. Chen, its CTO, received some $326 million worth and Jawed Karim, who left the venture early to go back to school, got $64 million worth. “This is great,” Hurley said in a video posted when the sale was announced. “Two kings have gotten together. The king of search, the king of video have gotten together. We’re going to have it our way.” YouTube’s sale price to Google is just a fraction of its estimated $550 billion value today, according to a MoffettNathanson research note reported by Variety in 2025. That’s a 333x increase (unadjusted for inflation) from nearly two decades prior. While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly, had Hurley and Chen received the same percentage of the sale today as they did in 2006, each could have walked away with m