Amazon priced its initial public offering at $18 per share in 1997.
Amazon went public on the Nasdaq on May 15, 1997, offering 3 million common shares. Deutsche Morgan Grenfell led the underwriting group, and the offering raised capital for the young online bookseller as it expanded its operations and customer base.
The $18 figure is the original, unadjusted IPO price. Amazon later carried out multiple stock splits, so financial websites often show a much smaller split-adjusted historical price. That adjusted number describes what the original price represents after the splits; it is not the amount investors paid in the 1997 offering.
Another common mix-up is confusing the IPO price with the stock’s first-day trading price or closing price. The IPO price was the amount offered to investors before public-market trading began. Amazon’s offering became a famous early internet-company IPO, even though the business was still reporting losses and had generated only modest revenue at the time.