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Bonnie Brown was not in a position to haggle. She was recently divorced and living with her sister, so when a small technology start-up offered her a job in 1999 as a part-time masseuse she took it. The post paid $450 a week, plus a pile of what were then worthless stock options.

Today, on the back of that package, Ms Brown, Google employee No 41, is a multimillionaire.

“Every time I give some away, it just keeps filling up again,” she told The New York Times of the fortune that she reaped from her former employer in the course of just five years. “It’s like an overflowing pot.”

The story is far from unique, even if most of Google’s newly minted millionaires are software gurus and sales whizzes, rather than master masseurs.

It is estimated that 1,000 employees, Ms Brown among them, have accrued fortunes worth at least $5 million apiece from the nine-year-old web giant’s rise and rise. The money has flowed from Google’s stranglehold of the hugely lucrative online advertising market (it reported revenues of $7.5 billion in the first half of the year alone) and investors’ seemingly insatiable appetite for the group’s shares. Yesterday, the company, founded in a garage by two students, sported a stock market value of some $207 billion.

There is, moreover, plenty left in the kitty. According to a recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wall Street watchdog, Google’s 16,000 staff, together with former workers, are holding options that they could cash in today worth more than $2 billion. A further $4 billion exists in options (which give holders the right to buy shares in the future at a price set in the past, allowing them to cash in any rise as a profit) that cannot yet be cashed in.

Since Bill Gates made a $59 billion fortune by founding Microsoft three decades ago, the software sector has been unusually fertile soil for sprouting billionaires, but few companiescan now rival Google’s reputation as a wealth creator.

Among those who have struck gold are the company’s backers. It is thought that Sequoia, a venture capital group famed for picking technology winners, invested $12.5 million in Google when it was little more than a bright idea. The stake was worth $1.5 billion when the group floated in 2004, a return of 120 times Sequoia’s original bet.

But such sums are eclipsed by those accrued by Google’s biggest winners. Its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin earn a token annual salary of $1, but they each own stock worth about $20 billion. Last year they sold a sliver of their holdings in the company they still control, earning an estimated $3 billion each in the process.

Indeed, for those Google foot soldiers who have cashed in all their options, the only regret can by that they did not hold out a little longer.

Ms Brown, 52, ditched her day job at Google shortly after the company’s stock market float. At the same time, she cashed in most of her options. The stock had doubled in value by then from its debut price of $85, easily enough to bag her a multimillion-dollar fortune.

Since then Ms Brown’s net worth has continued to climb, because those options she held on to (contrary to the advice of her financial advisers at the time) have ballooned in value. Google shares recently hit an all-time high of $747.24, up nearly 900 per cent from their debut. “I saved enough stock for a rainy day, and lately it’s been pouring,” Ms Brown said.

Of course, the gloss could yet be knocked off Google. Yesterday, its shares were trading at $664, sharply down from their recent peak amid continuing worries over the prospects of the global economy. Paying top staff, including giving stock options, to stay ahead of its arch-rivals Microsoft and Yahoo! is digging deeply into profits, adding to surging costs of $3 billion in the first half of the year. Google’s massive expansion plans, into tools such as word processing packages and mobile telephony, involve it competing with an army of potentially dangerous new rivals. Meanwhile, the company’s policy of toeing Beijing’s line on censorship in order to do business in China has been fiercely criticised by activists and US politicians, who claim it makes a mockery of Google corporate motto: “Do no evil”.

For those who joined the company in its early glory years, however, things must look bright. Ms Brown now owns a large house of her own and spends time travelling the world overseeing the charitable foundation that she founded with her windfall.

She is also looking for a publisher for her memoir - working title: Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google. And as you would expect, these days, at least once a week, she splashes out on her own private masseuse.

source: Times Online