End of dotcom era / 6 billion people
In his Field of Dreams column, David Lidsky writes a tongue and cheek article on CMGI taking its name off of the new Boston football stadium, finally ending the dot-com era in Fortune Small Business, August 12, 2002. The Internet holding company was once synonymous with smart investing in the Internet gold rush with a peak value in January 2000 of $56 billion. Yes, billion. That's 56,000 million*. Today its value has sunk to a mere $141 million.
But hey at least they're still around although as Lidsky puts it, their companies such as "UBid.com, the No. 2 auction site to eBay, which is kind of like being the No. 2 sun in our solar system." Can't even say that about most of the rest of us who were caught up in the implosion! :)
*The earth reached a population of 6 billion on October 12, 1999 according to Musee de l'Homme site which gives the UN credit for tracking this. How they do that when they can't seem to convince the US to pay a few million in fees, I'm not sure. But they seem to also know that 5 people are born every second and 2 die for a net gain of 3 people per second which means, they say, that the earth's population is doubling every 40 years and will reach 48 billion by 3019 or so. That's still a number smaller than the number of dollars CMGI was once worth...In fact, CMGI could have given close to $10 to every person alive on the planet at the time it reached its peak value (more than many people's monthly...maybe annual...salary).