Last fall, we learned that a former Google employee named Sanmay Ved had managed to purchase the “Google.com” domain name for exactly one minute before Google realized what had happened and snatched it back. Google on Thursday revealed exactly how much money it paid to Ved as compensation for his time owning its very valuable domain name. This being Google, you won’t be surprised to know that it involves a ridiculously geeky joke.
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You see, Google decided to award Ved by paying him $6,006.13. Why this number? Because in traditional leet (a.k.a., “1337”), this spells out “Google.” Google says it then decided to double this amount when Ved announced that he was going to give his reward away to charity, so Google paid out a grand total of $12,012.26 for its own domain name.
Amazingly, Ved managed to buy Google.com from Google Domains last fall for the super-low price of $12 before receiving a cancellation notice roughly a minute after the purchase. Regardless, this was a pretty good little investment on his part, even if he did decide to give all the money away to charity. Before today we had no idea how much his reward was, as he would only confirm that it was “very Googley” in a LinkedIn post.
