When the bell-ringing ceremony ended and the bidding phase began, watching Cisco's stock price keep surging higher, even some of the people involved in the listing felt a strange sense of unreality.
After two straight hours and seven rounds of bidding, Cisco stock officially began trading. It opened at twenty-eight dollars, a 55.5 percent jump from the eighteen-dollar issue price.
The 55.5 percent opening gain matched America Online's two months earlier, but Cisco's opening market capitalization reached 8.7 billion dollars, already higher than America Online's peak valuation on its IPO day.
Still, 8.7 billion dollars was only the beginning.
All day long the entire capital market stayed locked on Cisco's climbing share price.
Excluding the pre-trading bidding session, in just over four hours of actual trading the stock hit a high of 49.75 dollars, 276 percent of the issue price, briefly pushing the market cap to 15.47 billion dollars.
That valuation had already overtaken the more established tech giants Microsoft and Intel.
By the close of trading that day, Cisco's stock settled at 36.25 dollars, a 101 percent single-day gain and a market capitalization of 11.27 billion dollars.
In a single day a new corporate giant worth more than ten billion dollars had been born.
In Simon's memory, Yahoo's first trading day had seen its price peak at more than triple the offering price, yet even at that high its market cap had only reached around one billion dollars.
A one-billion-dollar company and a ten-billion-dollar company were obviously not in the same league.
And this was still only 1991.
In this era no company in all of North America had yet reached a trillion-dollar valuation.
Ten billion dollars was already a major threshold.
Take Time Warner, a media giant with twenty-five billion dollars in net assets. The previous year, because of the economic climate and heavy debt, its market cap had once fallen to just over eight billion dollars. Only after this year's stock-market rebound had it climbed back into the ten-billion-dollar club.
So Cisco smashing through the ten-billion-dollar market-cap barrier in one day could truly be called a miracle.
Beforehand, many Wall Street analysts had predicted Cisco's ideal IPO valuation would be around three billion dollars, and that only with strong market response might it break five billion after listing.
Simon's decision to set the IPO valuation directly at five billion dollars had been widely seen on Wall Street as a reckless gamble that would kill the golden goose, a clear mistake.
They argued the issue price was set too high, limiting upside, and that even if the IPO scraped through, the stock would likely break below offering price afterward, casting a long shadow over the company's future.
The actual result surprised everyone.
Intraday peak gain of 176 percent, peak market cap of 15.47 billion dollars.
Closing gain of 101 percent, closing market cap of 11.27 billion dollars.
Such a spectacular debut meant that even if the price pulled back later, nothing could hide the fact that Cisco had captured the capital market's full attention.
Looking back from the outcome, many realized the opening was not really a surprise at all.
The most obvious clue was that, unlike the America Online IPO, Simon Westeros had been far more high-profile and outspoken this time. The entire Westeros system had thrown its weight behind the Cisco listing, and Simon had even broken new ground by publishing a signed article in The New York Times.
A young man who had piled up tens of billions of dollars in wealth in just a few years was more than enough to set the capital markets on fire.
Simon Westeros's bold prediction at the bell ceremony that Cisco could reach a fifty-billion-dollar market cap in five years had ignited all the hype the Westeros system had been building.
Since the 1987 crash, the average annual return of the U.S. stock market had been under ten percent because of the lingering economic slump.
Even using Cisco's closing valuation of 11.27 billion dollars that day, reaching fifty billion dollars in five years would deliver returns juicy enough to make every pension fund, insurance fund, and institutional investor in North America scramble to get in.
Spurred by Cisco's explosive first-day performance, the technology sector across the entire U.S. market rose in sympathy.
Microsoft climbed 6.3 percent that day, closing at a market cap of 13.39 billion dollars.
Intel rose 3.7 percent, closing at 11.09 billion dollars.
America Online gained 7.1 percent, closing at 7.19 billion dollars and reclaiming the peak it had hit on its July IPO day.
In the middle of the broad tech rally, Motorola's 3.9 percent drop stood out like a sore thumb.
The reason was simple: one offhand sentence from Simon Westeros during the Cisco interview: "I already sold my Motorola shares."
In Simon's memory, Motorola had actually reached a trillion-dollar market cap around the peak of the tech wave in 2000. The company's performance had been climbing steadily the past two years thanks to the mobile-communications boom, making it a genuinely attractive investment.
But since the two sides had already clashed, Simon had no interest in smoothing things over.
Besides, when Nokia moved into the North American market next, Motorola would be the biggest roadblock.
During the Bell Atlantic acquisition, Motorola's objections to federal regulators had forced Simon to publicly promise that Nokia would stay out of North America.
This time the retired Motorola chairman Robert Galvin did not disappoint, once again stepping into the media to attack Simon. He called Simon's remarks at the Cisco ceremony extremely irresponsible and misleading to investors, and demanded that the SEC open an investigation.
Over the weekend that followed, Motorola's management was also forced to issue a public statement insisting the company's operations were excellent and announcing that it would enter the internet-equipment market to break Cisco's monopoly.
Because of Cisco's sky-high listing-day price, short-selling inevitably appeared on Wall Street.
Robert Galvin's attack played straight into the hands of certain hedge funds.
In the days that followed, a wave of media stories accused Simon of making irresponsible predictions about Cisco's future stock price. The irony was that forecasting a company's future share price was exactly what every Wall Street firm did every single day.
Every investment bank issued regular research reports.
Simon's claim that Cisco could reach fifty billion dollars in five years might have sounded outrageous to some, but it broke no federal securities regulations.
Despite the noise, Cisco's IPO had been an unqualified triumph.
Of the 720 million dollars raised, after fees Cisco walked away with 660 million dollars in cash.
The management team followed up the next week with a string of positive development announcements.
Buoyed by the good news and extremely active trading, Cisco's market cap stayed comfortably above ten billion dollars throughout the second week after listing.
The previously arranged greenshoe option was also executed smoothly.
Other Cisco shareholders sold an additional six million shares at the eighteen-dollar issue price, raising another 108 million dollars.
At the time those shareholders had been delighted when Simon agreed to the greenshoe mechanism. As long as the IPO succeeded, cashing out the extra six million shares would be easy even if the price did not rise much.
Now that Cisco's market cap had broken ten billion dollars in a single day, those same shareholders were bitterly regretting it.
At the current share price, the six million shares had essentially been handed away at half price. The sellers had lost more than a hundred million dollars in one stroke, and the pain was real.
Not to mention Simon Westeros's five-year, fifty-billion-dollar forecast.
Most investors were not short of patience. When they chose to cash out, it was usually because they were unsure about the company's future, not because they desperately needed the money.
No one could know what a company would become years down the road.
But if Simon Westeros's prediction came true, selling those extra shares now looked extremely shortsighted.
For Westeros Company, the other shareholders' decision to cash out actually brought benefits.
According to the equity structure agreed before the IPO, once initial shareholders sold their Class A shares, those shares automatically converted to Class B shares carrying only one-tenth the voting rights, unless otherwise negotiated and approved by the controlling shareholder and the board. This rule applied to everyone, including Westeros Company.
Simon had no intention of letting other shareholders sell without changing the voting character of their shares.
So the conversion of six million Class A shares to Class B shares further increased Westeros Company's voting control over Cisco.
With the successful IPO behind them, while the media continued debating the stock price, they quickly turned to another hot topic.
Exactly how rich was Simon Westeros right now?
The reason for the sudden interest was that Forbes magazine had announced it would release the new annual list of America's 400 richest people in mid-September.
Although the U.S. stock market had started recovering in the first half of the year and the Gulf War had ended cleanly, the broader American economy had not yet shaken off its slump.
Many top tycoons had seen their wealth stall under the tough environment. Some real-estate moguls had even gone bankrupt and disappeared from the North American rich lists entirely.
Simon was the clear exception.
In the past year alone the Westeros system had swallowed MCA and Bell Atlantic, two giants with a combined market value of fourteen billion dollars, pushing the group's total debt past ten billion dollars.
Yet after the back-to-back successes of America Online and Cisco, plus the huge gains in Westeros Company's heavy stakes in Microsoft, Intel, Sun, and other tech names, no one expected Simon Westeros's personal fortune to shrink.
Since last year Simon Westeros had already locked in the titles of both North America's richest person and the world's richest person.
The only question left was just how much bigger his net worth had grown this year.
Simon himself had no time to sit down and count.
Although Cisco's IPO had been a huge success, John Chambers and the rest of the management team were now feeling double the pressure because of Simon's five-year, fifty-billion-dollar prediction.
Since the words were already out, Simon had to pay closer attention to Cisco. Over the following weekend and the first few days of the new week he stayed in San Francisco, personally involved in the company's next round of planning.
This continued until Thursday, September 12, when Simon finally returned to Los Angeles.
Of course there was no time to relax.
On September 6, the same day Cisco listed, Kathryn's Thelma & Louise had opened across North America on 1,216 screens.
From September 6 to September 12, the film's first seven days brought in 7.74 million dollars at the box office, basically meeting Daenerys Entertainment's expectations.
With strong reviews, the movie was expected to enjoy a very healthy long run.
Besides this new release, a whole slate of other Daenerys Entertainment projects were moving forward steadily. The moment Simon returned to Los Angeles he plunged straight into handling them.
Strictly speaking, Hollywood was not suited to a professional-manager system. Major studios had always preferred a patriarchal, one-man-decides-all style.
The current "professional managers" at Sony's Columbia Pictures, Peter Guber and Jon Peters, were the clearest proof of how badly that approach could fail.
Because Sony had promised not to interfere with operations, Columbia's performance under the two men had grown steadily worse.
Therefore, even though Daenerys Entertainment had been split into Daenerys Pictures, New World Pictures, and Highgate Pictures, Simon still kept final say over every project. What he had delegated was mainly execution authority.
Besides, the planned output of roughly forty films a year across the three labels was not an overwhelming number.
And every film project usually meant investments of several million or even tens of millions of dollars. As long as he scheduled his time carefully around each project's needs, Simon could handle everything.
As mid-September arrived, the year-end box-office season was drawing close.
The final chapter of the Scream series, Scream 3, had been locked in for October 25, just over a month away, and would kick off Daenerys Entertainment's 1991 holiday slate.
During this period not only Scream 3 but also the studio's other year-end titles Toy Story, Cape Fear, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Piano, and more had all wrapped up.
Toy Story was unquestionably the centerpiece of the entire 1991 holiday lineup.
The film's own box-office performance was actually secondary. As long as it matched the success it had enjoyed in Simon's original timeline, the merchandise sales alone could reach billions of dollars. That was the real prize.
More importantly, Toy Story would give Universal Studios animated IP characters strong enough to stand toe-to-toe with Disney. That mattered just as much.
Without the planned Toy Story and next year's Jurassic Park projects, Simon would never have dared start construction on Universal Studios Osaka.
A movie-themed park without iconic big-screen characters to draw crowds would have a very predictable future.
Compared with Disneyland, Universal Studios had always suffered from a glaring IP weakness.
Before Daenerys Entertainment took over MCA, Universal had mostly survived by licensing characters from other studios to build attractions that could compete with Disney. Universal itself had tried developing many animated films, but none had succeeded. For years it had lacked any homegrown IP strong enough to anchor the parks.
In the original timeline, the reason Universal Pictures eventually produced hits like Despicable Me, Minions, and The Secret Life of Pets through Illumination Entertainment was precisely because the studio's overall strategy had forced it to keep investing heavily in 3D animation.