Ex-Google employee increased his net worth by 49,000% after glitch let him buy Google.com for just $12

While some people make their whole fortune gambling on the stock markets, it's an industry that most of us struggle to even get our heads around, let alone make any money on.

The internet is full of rags-to-riches stories about people who got in early and what your Tesla investment would be worth in 2025 if you'd stumped up the cash years ago.

What about Rob Gronkowski's Apple investment that's blossomed into a healthy pension pot after he forgot about it?

Although Google misses out on being one of only three companies to have ever passed that lucrative $4 trillion market cap, the fact that Alphabet (its overlord company) is currently valued at $3.81 trillion is nothing to be sniffed at.

Added to this that CEO Sundar Pichai is said to be worth a cool $1.5 billion, it shows that some people have gotten very rich off the internet giant. Not bad considering that Google started as a research project from Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University. As Brin is currently ranked as the fifth-richest person in the world, and Page the second, the pair clearly did something right.

One person who could've struck it rich from Google was US student Sanmay Ved, who managed to buy the Google.com domain on September 29, 2015. In the bizarre turn of events, the former Google employee managed to snap up the website for a mere $12.

As Ved was scrolling through the Google Domains website-buying service, he noticed Google.com was up for grabs and quickly paid the $12 credit card fee.

Although he was granted access to the company's webmaster tools and was inundated with messages that were supposed to go to Google's web administration team, the error was quickly spotted.

Ved was sent a cancellation message and had his $12 refunded when he was told that someone else had already registered Google.com.

Speaking to Business Insider in 2015, Ved explained how he was orignally going to get no compensation: "I don't care about the money. It was never about the money. I also want to set an example that it's people who want to find bugs that it's not always about the money."

Still, Google changed its mind and awarded him a 'bug bounty' for finding the glitch. The amount was said to be a very specific $6,006.13 because it (sort of) spells Google. This means the minuscule $12 investment boomed by 49,000% in a matter of moments. In reality, the investment ended up being much more.

After finding out that Ved planned on giving the money to charity, the tech Goliath doubled it amid promises that it was going to an Indian educational foundation

In the end, Ved didn't reveal the final sum, although he hinted it was "more than 10,000."

With the money going to The Art of India Living, Ved concluded: "I'm kind of a proponent for education."