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Facebook Reportedly Filing $5 Billion IPO Today
hypnosec writes "Today is the day when Facebook may be submitting all required paperwork to regulators for its $5 billion initial public offering. According to the source close to the deal, Facebook has selected Morgan Stanley along with four others — Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Barclay's Capital to handle this IPO. Morgan Stanley will be taking "lead left" role in this supposedly biggest IPO from Silicon Valley. According to International Financing Review, the preliminary target of $5 billion will be increased by many folds in coming few months as a response to the demands of investors. Sources close to this matter disclosed that this might turn out to be defining moment for current web investments. The deal might rise to $10 billion which eventually will make Facebook a social networking empire valued between $75 billion to $100 billion. In fact, $75 billion is definitely an undervaluation compared to previous expectations."
I'm having a hard time figuring out how the investors expect to get their money out....
Facebook reportedly has, what, 10% of the world's population? What's its growth model from here?
And how will it make the sort of money needed to pay the investors?
I guess I'm sort of stumped at the "business opportunity" offered here. At a guess, Z and 499 other shareholders are going to come out of this with a wad of cash and everyone else will be holding a deflated balloon in a few years....
You're assuming it'll grow. For a good laugh check out a recent zerohedge post (ZH is kind of the /. equivalent for the economic community?) showing graphs of share price as a % of IPO price for numerous recent (last year or so) tech stocks. All cratered below IPO price except for zynga which is somewhat volatile.
To have a bubble, first you have to have growth, and we're just not seeing that in recent tech IPOs.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No, he's quite right. You've built an elaborate justification for why you dislike it - but you've shown not on quanta of evidence that you get it.
If you believe it's only a marginal communications tool... Well, for it be a useful communications tool you've got to either want to communicate in the first place, or know people worth communicating with. (You and many other geeks keep blaming Facebook for your own failings.)
Here's what I've done on Facebook just today over the last eight hours:
Etc... etc...
Amount of Spam in my Facebook stream today - one. And with two clicks of a mouse, I'll never see spam from that game again. People in my contacts list who forward spam have either long since been silence or unfriended. As with the S/N ratio you complained about, the problem isn't Facebook, it's your ignorance or unwillingness to use the tools Facebook provides to control Spam and S/N.
Sounds like you'd have reccomended that people keep their money in good solid buggywhip and horse feed stocks rather than investing in that new fangled telephone invention. And do I really need to point out Google's stock prices - and that virtually their entire revenue stream depends on advertising? No, you're not insightful, you're just spiteful. You not only don't get it, you proudly revel in how little you get it.
I'm going to look around right now for people to screw and things to steal.
This poster truly groks the zeitgeist of the era.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'd add to your #1: Any info put on there can have very negative consequences. For example, if a profile scraper services sees a share or a like of a "hey, why do I need to press #1 for English?" picture, one is branded as a racist for seven years. Or if one likes tents or stealth camping, they might be branded as a supporter of OWS. A like of a smoking product can get one's health insurance company to demand a physical and bloodwork to see if someone's status changed. Liking of a park after dark and mention of that can get someone arrested months to years after the fact for criminal trespass.
My recommendation to everyone who has an Android device: Download the app "Exfoliate", making sure you have the right app from Michael Devine. Set what you want deleted, let it log in for you, and let it run. It will likely take days to finish, and it uses a lot of bandwidth. However, it is worth it, so a post from several years ago doesn't haunt someone in the future. After cleaning the profile, find another avenue to post one's thoughts, preferably one's own website.
Geeks know the danger about Facebook. In fact, I never bothered with an account until before I got my current job, where interviewers would ask me what my FB account ID was, and when I said that I didn't bother with one, I'd either be looked at like I was an imbecile, or explicitly told that if I don't keep up with social media, I'm too old to be in IT. So, I created accounts on the usual social networking sites with a nice clean persona, just to keep the HR droids happy.
What would be nice would be a geek-friendly social networking site designed from the ground up for privacy and security. It would likely cost something for membership, but that means that the cost is up front, and not paid for by privacy (the subscribers are the customers unlike FB where the true customers are the advertisers, and subscribers are at best a necessary evil.) It would use an object based system with each object (be it a message, a photo, a +1/like, etc.) being encrypted with a key object list to decrypt it. This way, unless a person explicitly gives access to someone (and this includes the public), the piece of data is encrypted, with a list of keys of whom can decrypt it (one of the keys being an ADK for law enforcement stored offline.) This way, it would be a lot harder to compromise someone's personal messages, while providing the judge with the search warrant a reason not to shut the service down and jail everyone involved.