SAN FRANCISCO — Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999 and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley startup with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.
After five years of kneading engineers' backs, Brown retired, cashing in most of her stock options, which were worth millions of dollars. To her delight, the shares she held onto have continued to balloon in value.
"I'm happy I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it's been pouring," said Brown, 52, who now lives in a 3,000-square-foot house in Nevada, gets her own massages at least once a week and has a private Pilates instructor. She has traveled the world to oversee a charitable foundation she started with her Google wealth and has written a book, still unpublished, "Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google."
Although no one keeps an official count of Google millionaires, it is estimated that 1,000 people each have more than $5 million worth of Google shares from stock grants and stock options.
One founder, Larry Page, has stock worth $20 billion. The other, Sergey Brin, has slightly less, $19.6 billion, according to Equilar, an executive compensation research firm in Redwood Shores, Calif. Three Google senior vice presidents — David Drummond, the chief legal officer; Shona Brown, who runs business operations; and Jonathan Rosenberg, who oversees product management — together are holding $160 million worth of Google stock and options.
"This is a very rare phenomenon, when one company so quickly becomes worth so much money," said Peter Hero, senior adviser to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which works with individuals and corporations to support charitable organizations in the region. "During the boom times, there were lots of companies whose employees made a lot of money fast, like Yahoo and Netscape. But the scale didn't approach Google."
Several Google employees interviewed for this article say they do not watch the dizzying climb of the company's shares. When it comes to awareness of the stock price, they say, Google is different from other large high-tech companies where they have worked, like Microsoft, where the day's stock price is a fixture on many people's computer screens.
At Google, the sensibility is more nuanced, they say. "It isn't considered 'Googley' to check the stock price," said an engineer, using the Google jargon for what is acceptable in the company's culture. As a result, there is a bold insistence, at least on the surface, that the stock price does not matter, said the engineer who did not want to be named, given that it is unseemly to discuss the price.
Others admit that, when gathered around the espresso machine, it is hard to avoid the topic of their sudden windfalls.
"It's very clear that people are taking nicer vacations," said one Google engineer, who asked not to be identified because it is also not Googley to talk about personal fortunes made at the company. "And one of the guys who works for me but has been there longer showed up at work in a really, really nice new car."