Have you got Net fever yet? It's hard to resist.
Last week, shares of eBay Inc., the online auctioneers, leaped 37 percent. If you bought 1,000 of them when they debuted four months ago at $18 a pop, you'd be sitting on a little over $303,000 today. Amazon.com continues its joy ride: The company has a market cap of $20 billion (not bad for a company that hasn't made a profit yet). America Online shares have split six times since the company went public in And let's not forget Yahoo!, which last week announced that it was going to buy GeoCities Inc. in a $3.9 billion stock swap. (Not bad for a company -- Geocities -- that had a net loss of $6.9 million in 1997 and another loss of $19.8 million in '98.)
I know greed is good -- ask Deng Xiaoping or Gordon Gecko -- but just what is going on here? Even Bill Gates recently said he thought that the values of Internet shares had gone out of control.