By Martin Baccardax
Jean Drapeau, a staunch advocate for hosting the 1976 Olympic Games during his colorful tenure as Montreal's mayor, once famously declared that the athletic jamboree could no more accrue debt "than a man could have a baby."
Drapeau passed away in 1999, some seven years before the 1.6 billion Canadian dollar tab (US$1.18 billion) for the Games, dubbed "The Big Owe, " was ultimately paid.
The lesson, of course, is both that life has a way of challenging your heartfelt assumptions in a rather ironic way and that making promises tied to time and debt can be a rather risky proposition.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is playing with both time and debt this week, with plans to raise US$20 billion amid a challenging week for the bond market as part of its larger effort to invest around US$185 billion this year, with more expected after that, on artificial intelligence technologies.
The multipart sale, reports suggest, includes a bond that won't mature until 2126. Officials at Alphabet were not immediately available for comment.
Google's so-called "century bond" will join a relatively short list of corporate paper sold with a 100-year maturity, including a US$2.5 billion "green bond" offering from Ford Motor Co. in 2021.
Motorola, which split into two companies in 2011, was the last high-grade company to issue a 100-year bond, selling the paper in 1997.
Other blue chip American companies, such as Walt Disney, Coca-Cola and International Business Machines, issued century bonds in the early 1990s, when 30-year Treasury yields were trading at a two-decade low of around 6%.
Locking in rates just north of that, it seemed, was a spectacular opportunity to secure long-term funding. Only it wasn't.
Benchmark 30-year yields fell another 5 full percentage points over the next 15 years, bottoming out at 1.27% during the 2020 pandemic, meaning companies such as Coca-Cola were paying coupons of 7.375% on their century bonds when they could have been paying something in the region of 2.375%.
To say nothing of the changes in business conditions. Coca-Cola had a market value of US$43 billion in the late 1990s, a level it wasn't able to reach again until 2016.
IBM, the world's bellwether tech company for several decades, began its long decline shortly after issuing its 100-year bond in 1996 as upstarts such as Microsoft, Apple and indeed Google began dominating the dot-com era.
"At the start of 1997, Motorola was a top 25 market cap and top 25 revenue corporation in America. The Motorola corporate brand in 1997 was ranked #1 in the U.S., ahead of Microsoft," said Big Short investor Michael Burry through his X social media account.
"Today, Motorola is the 232nd largest market cap with only US$11 billion in sales," he added.
Google itself is making a massive bet on the future, with not only its 2026 capex plans but its broader ambitions in self-driving cars, robotics, AI technologies and quantum computing via their next-generation Willow processors.
But even CEO Sundar Pichai isn't making bold predictions too far past the next decade of his company's "moon shot" ambitions.
Investors, on the other hand, seem a lot more eager. Reports suggest Google's US$20 billion bond sale, which includes tranches in Swiss francs, British pounds and U.S. dollars, as well as maturities ranging from 3 years to the aforementioned century offering, has attracted more than US$100 billion in overall demand.
Nancy Tengler CEO and CIO of Laffer Tengler Investments, has a theory as to why.
"I think you have to view this very differently than in the 90s, when I was managing money, because these companies now have enormous cash reserves," she said.
"We're not just betting on AI -- we also believe in robotics, space, quantum, and nuclear as key areas to round out our strategy, and all of these will drive meaningful change," she added.
What that means for anything, debt, equity or otherwise, 100 years from now remains to be seen.
But it's hard not to reflect on the accidental wisdom of baseball legend Yogi Berra.
"It's tough to make predictions," he once opined. "Especially about the future."
Write to Martin Baccardax at martin.baccardax@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 09, 2026 14:40 ET (19:40 GMT)
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