Ex-Google employee bought Google.com for $12 after glitch lists it as available, Google paid him a whole lot more for it back
Published on Nov 30, 2025 at 6:08 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Nov 27, 2025 at 8:38 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Emma Matthews
A former Google employee was somehow able to buy the domain Google.com for just $12.
It was a glitch, but Google still agreed to buy it back from him.
The sum they offered was relatively small, but it had a specific meaning.
And he decided to give it to charity, which was a nice gesture.
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Why this ex-Google employee was able to buy the domain for just $12
In 2015, ex‑Google employee Sanmay Ved snapped up the google.com domain for just twelve bucks after a glitch listed it as available.
It was actually a double glitch.
A, because it was just $12, and B, because it was available in the first place.
But that didn’t matter to Google, because the company agreed to actually buy it back from him.
Although, to be fair, the amount they offered was symbolic.
The tech giant bought it back for exactly $6,006.13, a number they chose because it spells ‘Google’. Sort of.
And he didn’t keep the money anyway because he gave it to charity.
“I don’t care about the money, ” Ved told Business Insider.
“I also want to set an example that it’s people who want to find bugs, that it’s not always about the money.”
It’s probably too late, but this ‘side gig’ made people a fortune
It’s probably a little too late now, but in the early days of the internet, some people made a fortune ‘trading’ domains.
Good (side) gig if you can get it.
American investor and Bitcoin ‘evangelist’ Michael Saylor did it in the 1990s.
Saylor has become somewhat of a celebrity because his publicly traded company, Strategy, keeps buying Bitcoin, but most people don’t know that he also made a fortune selling domains.
In the 1990s, he bought several one-word domains, including hope.com, courage.com, angel.com, voice.com, and speaker.com.
His company commercialized one of them, Alarm.com, and sold most of the others for hundreds of millions.
Definitely a good idea in the 1990s or even the 2000s, but probably not super effective in the 2020s.
