by Tim Price
Sovereign Man
On January 30, 2000, the 88+ million viewers of Superbowl XXXIV were treated to a commercial featuring a now infamous sock puppet.
The advertisement was from a company called Pets.com, founded just two years before in 1998 at the height of the dot-com bubble.
Pets.com went public on the NASDAQ just weeks after the Superbowl with the symbol IPET.
And just 270 days later it was out of business, its stock price having fallen from $11 to just 19 cents in the interim.