What is the Best Performing Tech Stock Ever?

We recently wrote an article about how artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be compared to the “dot-com” days because “this time it’s different”. While researching that article we came across a stock that could be called the “best performing tech stock ever” which appreciated +74,000% in a single year. To put that into perspective, an investment of $1,000 would be worth about $740,000, enough to buy a one-bedroom apartment small studio in Silicon Valley. If you speculated in that stock you may have done well, but if you invested in that stock it would be all but worthless today. This made us think. What has been the best performing tech stock ever for investors?

Aside from just a passing curiosity, this becomes relevant when you have people like Mark Cuban talking about “the next AI trillionaire“. When we look at a company like Nvidia, we see a “picks and shovels” play on AI. This makes us think, “just what sort of price appreciation is realistically possible?”. Stock price appreciation is a form of value creation, so another way of asking this question is “which stock created the most value to-date in the least amount of time?”

When doing this exercise, we wanted to set some ground rules as follows: