Walmart’s 1970 IPO remains a benchmark for long-shot investors, according to a new ranking

A market roundup circulating this week argued that Walmart’s initial public offering in 1970 still stands out as a high watermark for IPO wealth creation. The article, published by Yahoo Finance and distributed through a Crypto-focused outlet, claims Walmart is at the top of a “biggest IPO returns” ranking, describing a hypothetical $1,000 investment that grows to $38.9 million over time.

The same ranking also takes aim at more recent, high-profile IPO targets and would-be “early” investors. It points to SpaceX and Nvidia as names that appear lower in the list, using their positions as a caution that even companies with strong market momentum may not deliver the kind of outsized compounded returns investors sometimes expect from public-market debuts.

The logic behind the comparison is straightforward but uncomfortable for buyers of new issues. IPO returns do not depend only on whether a company becomes valuable, they also depend on the entry price, the amount of dilution over time, how quickly shares reprice as the company’s fundamentals evolve, and whether the post-IPO period includes sustained growth rather than volatility.

In Walmart’s case, the article’s central takeaway is not a forecast about the retailer’s future performance. Instead, it frames 1970 as a case study in how a public-market path can produce extraordinary outcomes when a company continues to expand and remain relevant for decades after listing.

Walmart, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker WMT, has long been viewed as a durable consumer and retail infrastructure business. In that sense, the ranking’s use of Walmart is consistent with a broader market pattern: the biggest multi-decade winners often look less like short-lived “story stocks” and more like businesses that steadily reinvest and scale.

Even so, the ranking also underscores a limitation of any single spreadsheet-based comparison. The article does not provide, in the text made available here, the full methodology for how returns were calculated, including whether it accounts for stock splits, reinvested dividends, changes in share classes, or other corporate actions that can substantially alter outcomes.

SpaceX’s inclusion is also inherently different from traditional IPO stories because the company’s financing path has not mirrored every public-market lifecycle. The ranking appears to use a comparison approach that treats SpaceX as a relevant “buyer” reference point, but without the full return assumptions shown here, readers should be cautious about treating the placement as a clean like-for-like measure.

What to watch next is whether more complete data is published alongside these rankings, including the return calculation method and the time horizon used for each company. For investors and observers, the practical value of the exercise is less in the leaderboard itself and more in prompting scrutiny of the assumptions behind any “IPO returns” comparison, especially for companies that may not fit the standard public-debut timeline.