The $133 Million Bet That Became the Whole Company

A U.S. startup just hit a $1 billion valuation, joining billion-dollar private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance. Unlike those other unicorns, you can invest. Over 49,000 people already have. So have industry giants like General Motors and POSCO.

Why all the interest? EnergyX’s patented tech can recover up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods. That’s a big deal, as demand for lithium is expected to 5X current production levels by 2040. Now, they’re moving to commercial production, tapping into 100,000+ acres of lithium deposits in Chile, a potential $1.1B in annual revenue opportunity. Right now, you can invest at this pivotal stage.

In February 2000, Glenn Fogel quit his job as a Wall Street trader and walked into the offices of Priceline.com. "A week later, the Nasdaq peaked," he told Fortune. Within a year, the stock dropped from $165 to $1. "Even my mother thought the company had gone bankrupt." Fogel stayed. And five years later, he helped push through a deal that changed everything — the $133 million purchase of a small Dutch hotel-booking website called Bookings B.V. Today, that little Amsterdam site generates roughly 90% of the parent company's revenue.

I booked a hotel in Lisbon last spring. I didn't go to Priceline. I didn't think about William Shatner or "Name Your Own Price." I typed the city into Booking.com, scrolled through reviews, and paid with two taps. I had no idea — until I checked — that Booking.com and Priceline were the same company. You've probably done the same thing without thinking about it.

You might remember Priceline as a dot-com gimmick. But the real business — the one that collects a commission on every room night booked across 220 countries — is the Amsterdam website they picked up for $133 million in 2005. The child swallowed the parent.

In 1996, a University of Twente graduate named Geert-Jan Bruinsma tried to book a hotel room in Amsterdam online. He couldn't. So he built a website to do it — with a server under his desk. That site became Bookings.nl. By the time Priceline found it nine years later, it had cracked the code of European hotel distribution. Jeff Boyd, Priceline's CEO, bet $133 million on it. In 2018, the company renamed itself after the acquisition.

In FY2025, $186.1 billion in gross travel bookings flowed through Booking Holdings' platforms. The company kept $26.9 billion as revenue — roughly a 14% cut of every dollar travelers spent. Of that, $9.1 billion fell straight to free cash flow. That's $9.1 billion the company didn't need for buildings, airplanes, or hotel rooms — because it doesn't own any. It used $6.4 billion of that free cash flow to repurchase its own shares. Since 2014, the share count has dropped from 51.9 million to about 31.9 million.

See this official SEC document? On page 146 Elon Musk revealed the name of a startup that Jeff believes will be…

The next monster IPO on Wall Street. (Click here to get the details.)

Even though this has nothing to do with robots, self-driving cars, or rockets…

This startup is growing faster than Tesla… faster than SpaceX… and even 23 times faster than Nvidia.

That's why The Atlantic called it…

"The fastest-growing business in the history of capitalism." (Click here to get the name, 100% free of charge.)

4.4 million properties. Think about that number. Hotels, hostels, apartments, houseboats — every kind of place a traveler might sleep. Each one needs guests. And Booking.com is how they get found. If you search for a hotel in Barcelona tonight, you'll find it on Booking.com before you find it anywhere else. The more listings the platform carries, the more travelers it attracts. The more travelers it attracts, the more properties list. That loop has been spinning for two decades.

Booking.com charges hotels a commission on each reservation — typically around 15%. Hotels that want better placement can join the Preferred Partner program and pay roughly 3% more. The merchant model — where Booking handles the payment directly — now accounts for about 66% of revenue, up from around 24% in 2019. Each shift toward that model gives the company more control over the transaction. Hotels grumble about the fees. They keep listing.

There's a detail in this story that deserves a pause. Glenn Fogel didn't just survive the dot-com crash. He stayed for 25 years. He started as a vice president doing corporate development. He led the strategy team that identified and executed every major acquisition — Booking.com, Agoda, KAYAK, OpenTable, Rentalcars.com. When he became CEO in 2017, he pushed through one more change: renaming the entire parent company. In February 2018, The Priceline Group Inc. officially became Booking Holdings Inc. It was an admission — and a quiet declaration. The acquisition hadn't just saved the company. It had become the company.

The flywheel goes beyond hotel rooms now. When you book a room, Booking.com offers flights, rental cars, airport taxis, and tours. Each added product deepens the relationship and adds revenue the company didn't have five years ago. Fogel calls this the "Connected Trip." In FY2025, flight tickets sold through Booking.com grew 37% year over year. Attraction tickets grew roughly 80%. The hotel room is the anchor. Everything else is the upsell.

WHY THIS WORKS

Booking Holdings has negative stockholders' equity — not because it's broke, but because it has repurchased more than $54 billion of its own stock, more than its retained earnings and paid-in capital combined. The balance sheet looks broken. It's broken on purpose.