What did Google pay to get back its .com domain name? Millions or billions of bucks?
Not even close.
After student Sanmay Ved bought the prestigious web address for $12 after spotting it for sale on Google Domains in September, the company shelled out a mere $6,006.13 for its safe return.
It's not bad for an investment that lasted little more than a minute. Ved alerted Google right away and his purchase was canceled.
But it's not quite the sum you'd think the web giant would be prepared to fork over for the address on which its entire multi-billion dollar business is built.
How did Google come up with the seemingly random figure? Apparently, $6,006.13 is "Google" spelled numerically.
"Squint a little and you'll see it!" the company wrote in a blog post Thursday detailing its Google Security Reward Programs, which pay people, like Ved, who find vulnerabilities in the company's products.
Currently studying at Babson College in Massachusetts, Ved previously worked as an account strategist at Google from 2007 to 2012. He said he was browsing the company's tracker in September when he saw Google.com was up for grabs. He bought it, but immediately surrendered it back to the web giant.
Instead of pocketing the reward money, Ved asked Google to donate it to the Art of Living India Foundation, a humanitarian and educational NGO based in India. The company agreed and doubled the total to $12,012.26.
"I still love the company, and what it does and stand[s] for," Ved told The Huffington Post last year. "It was very kind of them to offer double the reward since it was going to charity."
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