How does a stock go from $173,000,000,000 per share to $0.11?

Question

Investing noob here.
TOPS stock (TOP Ships Inc) on the NASDAQ is currently trading at $0.11 per share but it used to be billions per share.
Did they continuously raise so much capital that investors kept getting diluted? Is this a result of stock splitting? I really cannot fathom that stock's early valuation.
Could such a monumental plunge happen to current high value stocks such as Amazon, Tesla, or BRK.A?

Bob Baerker · Accepted Answer

It's even worse than you think.  The high price for TOPS in 2004 was $173,502,005,248
The reason for this absurd price is that TOPS has had many, many reverse splits.  Here are the ones since 2008:

03/20/2008 1 for 3
06/24/2011 1 for 10
04/21/2014 1 for 7
02/22/2016 1 for 10
05/11/2017 1 for 20
06/23/2017 1 for 15
08/03/2017 1 for 30
10/06/2017 1 for 2
03/26/2018 1 for 10
08/22/2019 1 for 20

If you hypothetically owned 7,560,000,000 shares at the outset, after all of these reverse splits, you'd own one share.

How does a stock go from $173,000,000,000 per share to $0.11?

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