On Friday, February 15, 2002, PayPal went public and enjoyed a 55% first-day pop. The financial press, which had been so instrumental in cheerleading for the bubble, now proved downright hostile to the return of Internet IPOs. “It’s an anachronism—straight out of 1999,” the New York Times quoted a stock analyst as saying. “It’s like we’ve kind of forgotten what got us into this situation in the first place.”5 But doubters were proved wrong a mere five months later when eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, one of the biggest acquisitions in the wake of the dot-com implosion.
