if you bought $100 of every real company mentioned on silicon valley…
i love silicon valley (the hbo show, not the place), and i've always had a hunch it was a little too ahead of its time: bitcoin in season 1, palantir in 2017, a final season about ai taking over tech companies years before the rest of us were living it. so i put a number on the hunch. every real company or asset named across all 53 episodes, $100 bought the first trading day after it aired, and followed all the way to today (through every acquisition, spin-off and dividend, or down to zero for the ones that didn't make it).
prices as of ·
account growth
what the whole account was worth, month by month, every $100 valued at that month's real prices. the blue line is the same $100s dropped into the s&p 500 on the same days, because the honest question was never whether it made money (it was a great decade for almost everything). it's whether the show beat the market. dots are episodes with buys; hover anywhere for the story.tap anywhere for the story.
every single bet
every $100 as one dot, placed by what it turned into (log scale). most landed somewhere between 1x and 10x; a couple did something else entirely. hover for the line that triggered it, click for the whole story.tap a dot for the line that triggered it, tap it again for the whole story.
leaderboard
the 12 companies whose mentions turned into the most money. the tick is what went in across all mentions, the dot is what it's worth now. log scale, because bitcoin broke the linear one. click a company for its full story.
where did they all go
not everything was guaranteed to 10x. here's where every company the money touched ended up: still trading, swallowed by someone bigger, bought out for cash, or gone. the tape runs like the market's; hover to pause it, click a name for its story.tap a name for its story.
season map
every episode, colored by how its buys did: terracotta lost money, gold about broke even, green multiplied it. white means nothing you could buy came up. click an episode to see what was said.
table view: all 53 episodes
| episode | air date | title | buys | invested | worth now |
|---|
pre-ipo bets
a lot of what the show name-dropped wasn't even public yet (uber, airbnb, palantir, snapchat), so you couldn't buy it the day it aired. this is the next best thing: $100 at each one's first day of trading.
table view: every ipo
| company | ticker | first mention | ipo date | ipo price | $100 became | return |
|---|
hot takes
outside of the jokes and references, some lines were genuine calls on a company. these are those lines, graded by how they actually played out. turns out they really knew their shit. click one to see the money move.
explore all mentions
every episode, every mention. pick a season and an episode, or search for any company.
the raw table: every buy in one list
| episode | air date | company | ticker | quote | $100 became | return |
|---|
the data
everything behind the page, for anyone who wants to check my work. the transcripts themselves aren't here (that's hbo's dialogue), but everything i derived from them is, and the numbers update every saturday.
sources and credit
- episodes and air dates: wikipedia's list of silicon valley episodes
- dialogue: the official episode subtitles, an audio transcription of every episode, and springfield! springfield! scripts where the subtitles fell short (season 4, episodes 2 and 3)
- prices: yahoo finance, through the open-source yfinance library
- independent price checks: cnbc, nasdaq.com, eastmoney, investing.com and statmuse
- stocks that no longer trade: archived pages on the internet archive's wayback machine, investing.com and stockanalysis
- acquisitions, spin-offs and ownership: sec edgar filings and company investor relations pages
- bitcoin before september 2014: coinmarketcap
- built with: claude code, d3 and a lot of rereading
how this works (because i asked the same thing: how do i know this is legit?): every mention was pulled from the official subtitles by two independent reads, checked against a third script where the subtitles fell short. each $100 buys at the close of the first trading day after the episode aired, through whoever owned the company that day (instagram stays instagram on the page, but the money bought facebook). dividends get reinvested. when a company was bought, cash stays cash and stock becomes the buyer's shares. foreign companies trade on their home exchange, converted to dollars, and delisted stocks use archived prices and the deal terms from sec filings. not investment advice; it's a tv show.