The online auction company that went public in 1998 was eBay. Its shares began trading on NASDAQ on September 24, 1998, during the dot-com boom, after the company built a fast-growing marketplace for person-to-person online sales.
eBay began as AuctionWeb, a website created by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995. One famous early sale was a broken laser pointer, which helped illustrate the site’s unusual idea: buyers and sellers could find one another online and establish prices through auctions. The service was renamed eBay in 1997, and Meg Whitman became president and CEO in 1998.
The IPO was priced at $18 per share, but the stock closed its first trading day at about $47—often reported as roughly $53 depending on the historical account and price measure used. That explosive debut made eBay a defining internet-era company. Priceline, Yahoo!, and Amazon were also internet businesses that became public companies, but eBay is the one associated with online auctions.