Google’s employees have just become significantly richer overnight. After a long period during which the company’s stock had languished on the back of concerns over the eroding relevance of the search engine, the markets had a pleasant surprise for Google’s 53,000 employees – the stock rose a stunning 16% on Friday after the announcement of the company’s quarterly earnings.

A 16% rise on the stock market is not remarkable in itself, but it’s virtually unheard of for a company of Google’s size. Its market capitalization now stands at $468 billion, second only to Apple. Of this, a staggering $65 billion were added on Friday. This value is greater than the entire market capitalization of fellow tech companies Hewlett Packard, Netflix, and Yahoo, and nearly 3 times of the entire market cap of Twitter.

The greatest beneficiaries of this stock move were the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose net worths rose by a cool $4 billion each. The benefits have also been shared by employees, who typically receive 20-30% of their annual compensation in the form of Google stock.

“It’s quite surreal to make such an amount over a weekend”, said a Google employee of 6 years, who declined give a figure , but described it as “significant”. “I’m definitely going out to celebrate.”

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