Walmart’s 1970 IPO Still Has a Lesson for SpaceX Buyers

A $1,000 investment in Walmart when it went public in 1970 would be worth about $38.9 million today. That makes Walmart the biggest IPO in US history, in terms of investment return. 

The result is striking because Walmart’s IPO was tiny by modern standards. It raised less than $5 million. SpaceX, which completed the largest IPO in US history this June, raised tens of billions. So how did such a small listing produce such an enormous return?

How Stock Splits Turned $1,000 Into $38.9 Million

When Walmart went public in October 1970, it sold 300,000 shares for $16.50 each, raising just $4.95 million. Its shares became much more valuable over the following 56 years. But looking at Walmart’s share price today tells only a small part of the story. The key is stock splits.

A stock split gives investors more shares without changing the total value of their investment at the time. If a company does a two-for-one split, for example, someone holding one share suddenly owns two.

Walmart has done this 12 times since its IPO. As a result, one Walmart share bought in 1970 has turned into 6,144 shares today.

“The figure most people quote for these companies is wrong, and it is wrong in the same direction every time… The real number is closer to 3,885,000%, and the whole gap is twelve stock splits the arithmetic dropped,” read a remark in the report, citing a market analyst from Taurex.

Coca-Cola shows the same effect even more clearly. One Coca-Cola share bought when the company began trading in 1919 has become 9,216 shares after 11 stock splits. At current prices, those shares are worth roughly $830,000.

Nvidia’s Earnings Already Reshuffled the List

Nvidia has already moved, with the study, which used its August 26 close of $209.66, ranking the chipmaker fifth, with a $1,000 stake worth $8.39 million.

Nvidia’s Q2 earnings showed revenue reached $96.2 billion, up 106% in a year. Data center sales rose 117%. The stock then gained 8.7%.

With NVDA stock near $226 on Friday, that same stake is worth about $9 million. Nvidia therefore passes McDonald’s. It sits roughly $350,000 short of Home Depot.

A 56-year ranking shifted in one session.

The Lesson for SpaceX and Anthropic Buyers

The biggest IPO return does not mean the fastest growth. Nvidia compounded at roughly 39% a year, compared with Walmart’s 21%. Walmart simply had 56 years to grow.

Holding for that long is the difficult part. Nvidia went public just 14 months before the dot-com crash, when the Nasdaq eventually lost nearly 80%.

The ranking also has three important limits:

• It excludes decades of dividends from companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Walmart.
• It assumes investors bought at the IPO price, which most retail investors cannot access.
• It only counts companies that survived long enough to become winners.

Even Walmart still has bad weeks. Its shares fell almost 6% last week after a rare sales miss.

For today’s IPO buyers, the bigger question is what happens over the next few decades. SpaceX priced its shares at $135 and opened at $150, with its record IPO valuing the company above $2 trillion.

Anthropic could follow this autumn with an even larger raise.

Neither has split its stock yet. Walmart’s history shows why that could eventually matter.