This Is How Much The Man Who Owned Google.com For One Second Was Paid

In September 2015, an MBA student named Sanmay Ved briefly owned the Google.com URL.

How did the grad student and former Google employee come to purchase the iconic domain name?

Ved detailed the unlikely experience in a LinkedIn post:

“A strange thing happened at 1:20 AM Eastern Time on Tuesday, September 29. I was learning more about the Google Domains interface, and typed google.com and clicked search domains. To my surprise, Google.com was showing as available! “

He then added the domain to his cart and continued: “I was hoping I would get an error at sometime saying transaction did not go through, but I was able to complete purchase, and my credit card was actually charged!”

For a whopping $12.

Here’s his purchase confirmation message.

However, since Google owns Google Domains (the service that Ved used to make the purchase), the company was able to cancel the transaction almost instantly. Ved owned the Google domain for exactly one minute.

Google Security eventually contacted Ved and offered him $6,000.13 (which kinda spells “Google”) as a reward for discovering and reporting the security flaw.

Ved wasn’t interested in making money from the experience, however. He told Google to donate the $6k to the Art of Living India Foundation, and they were happy to comply; even doubling the amount of the donation.

$12,000 for one minute. Those are pretty good earnings.