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."

Comments

Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[elrous0]

Time to tap into the kids' college fund. They can thank me later.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[alen]

from the leaked financials last year facebook is making money. I think it was $250 million or so NET profit on revenues of $1.5 BILLION.

for a lot of people facebook is the new contact list and has replaced email for most communication. my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication.

but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only a P/E of 400. Seems reasonable.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook was cool 6 years ago (no really: it was actually really exciting). Then we got the "apps" nonsense. Then Grandma got an account. And now Coca-Cola (tm) has "fans". WTF? It's not cool anymore. Geeks already got it, and got out.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[iggymanz]

the geeks I know with more than half a brain don't do social networking sites at all.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[zill]

He said "sites", as in "websites", which all rely on the HTTP(S) protocol. IRC is a completely different protocol.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[eln]

MySpace and Friendster would like a word with you.

Obviously Facebook has been far more successful than any of its predecessors, but it's still an Internet property that could be replaced and fall virtually overnight at any moment. It may be a good buy now, but if you're caught holding the bag at the wrong time you could easily lose your shirt.

The best prospect for Facebook investors remains for it to be bought out by some large conglomerate so they can cash out before the bottom falls out. Young people are already abandoning it as they don't like hanging out where their parents and grandparents also hang out, and even some older people (not as many as Google had hoped) have likewise abandoned it for Google Plus. At some point, some other site will come along and eat Facebook's lunch, it's only a matter of time.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[EdIII]

my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication........but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.

LOL.

Uhhh, no. I "got" it. Then threw it back like the steaming turd that it was and still is.

I got a fake Facebook account some time ago to keep connected with younger relatives since it seemed the only way to get their attention was to play Mafia Wars or place a message sign on their farm in Farmville. Being a geek and techie, I saw Facebook for what it really was:

1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.
2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes.
3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place. Starting their own credit system was basically a coup against Zynga which was valued in the billions initially because of revenue, most of which was illicitly gained through dirty tactics like premium charges on cell phones and other such instances of fraud. One of my younger relatives got hit with a $300 cell phone bill one month and honestly did not know the consequences of wanting some shiny that Zynga was offering.

So, No you are quite wrong. Most of us geeks and techies completely understand the trend that Facebook is. When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".

What I wish is that other people would get what Facebook really is.

Your comment about SPAM and marketing is utter hilarity considering what the Facebook experience was like for me for the short while that I had it. Marketing overload anyone........ I had less SPAM and useless information coming into my junkmail folder at Yahoo, and that is saying something.

Anybody that puts money into this is a sucker. They are just making the payday dreams of the early and special investors come true and then you are holding the bag of shit. Same with Zynga.

Facebook might be hot for awhile, but the real trend is an evolving method of communication. To say that Facebook has the lock on that it is incredibly untrue. So many different projects in the works to satisfy this new kind of communication methodology, and with far better signal to noise ratios too.

At the end of the day Facebook has revenues tied to something that you would be foolish to call "stable". It's damn near whimsical over the long run.

Put your thinking cap on for a second. 75 billion. With a B. How can that possibly be true in reality? We are not talking Exxon here that makes something tangible that we are literally addicted too. This is based off credits and advertising revenue, both of which don't have a strong foundation, and can have a huge swing in profitability and volume.

Facebook and Zynga are incredibly over valued and over hyped. God help everyone who buys into it at the high range.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Mark, get a fucking /. account already.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[DerekLyons]

So, No you are quite wrong. Most of us geeks and techies completely understand the trend that Facebook is. When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".

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:

• Commiserated with friends, family, and high school classmates over the sudden (and much too young) death of a classmate on Sunday.
• Got a status update from a friend whose newborn is still in the hospital and quite ill.
• Continued planning, with a bunch of old shipmates, activities for our next re-union.
• Shared with family and friends photographs from a photowalk last week. (I.E. not phone pictures, but serious pictures I took and uploaded to Flickr.)
• Got tips from my sister (a professional chef) and some foodie friends on a new dish I'm trying to cook for the first time for tonite's dinner

Etc... etc...
 

Your comment about SPAM and marketing is utter hilarity considering what the Facebook experience was like for me for the short while that I had it. Marketing overload anyone........ I had less SPAM and useless information coming into my junkmail folder at Yahoo, and that is saying something.

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.
 

Put your thinking cap on for a second. 75 billion. With a B. How can that possibly be true in reality? We are not talking Exxon here that makes something tangible that we are literally addicted too. This is based off credits and advertising revenue, both of which don't have a strong foundation, and can have a huge swing in profitability and volume.

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.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[kiwimate]

Don't know quite what you're doing, but your rant does demonstrate that, yeah, you really don't get it.

1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.

You do realize you don't have to put in lots of information, don't you? There's very, very, very little that Facebook actually requires you to enter.

2) A marginally effective communication tool. Signal to noise ratio sucked, because much like Twitter, you had a constant stream of information that was barely useful, relevant or interesting. Especially, when there is a huge trend to manipulate you into posting other people's content on your wall for marketing purposes.

Signal to noise ratio was a bit off for me, to start. So I blocked anything coming from games and turned off anything coming from the small number of people who were on my Friends list who were the worst offenders at constantly posting status updates. If I want to know anything about them, I go to their profile page.

Which turned Facebook into an incredibly useful communications tool for me. YMMV. I have regular conversations with a cousin who I hadn't seen in years because we lived on opposite sides of the world (literally) and I didn't know her e-mail address. Friends change e-mails? I don't have to know - they stay in the same place on Facebook.

3) A gaming platform thinly disguised as a social networking platform where Facebook was constantly fighting to get a real piece of the financial action taking place.

No, it's a social networking platform that sees a lucrative side business in gaming. Don't like it? Don't play the games. You don't have to, you know.

I have tried a handful of games from time to time. Yes, I tried Farmville to see what all the fuss was about. Bored me. Deleted. End of that.

And I can't imagine why you're getting a whole load of spam. I have never gotten spam from Facebook. Not once. I have received e-mails that I signed up for, until I decided, ehh, not interested, and changed my prefs. Result=nothing. As in no more e-mails. Easy.

When we disagree, refuse to participate, and quite often make condescending and derisive comments towards other people that don't understand what we see you misinterpret that as us "not getting it".

Well, yes. What's the alternative? Either you are refusing to admit that something that's not useful to you might possibly be useful to someone else, or you're just being smug and - you said it yourself - condescending because you're too cool to use Facebook, in which case you're just being an immature jerk. Or you don't get it. Which is it?

if you don't like Facebook, don't use it. Easy. Done. Move on with your life. Let the insignificant masses who are so inferior to you have their fun.

Anybody that puts money into this is a sucker

Insert standard disclaimers - past performance is no guarantee of future performance, you should only invest as much as you can afford to lose, all investments carry an element of risk, etc. An investor either makes an educated gamble, or they do something on a whim. If it's the latter, well, it doesn't matter if it's Facebook or HP, they're making an uneducated gamble.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[rtb61]

They will fix this by going on a buying spree, using the shares as junk bonds to buy companies that actually make money. When it all washes out the only real losers will be the pension funds whose executives got paid tax haven purchasing commissions.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[Serious Callers Only]

for a lot of people facebook is the new contact list and has replaced email for most communication. my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication.but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.

And those who are sucked into a fad or bubble are often the last to admit that they were wrong.

This time is different

In addition to Facebook being far more spammy than any email I've ever owned, the fact that it is popular with vast numbers of people does not mean that they can turn that into significant revenue - enough to justify $100 billion valuation would be quite remarkable when they've already jumped the shark.

from the leaked financials last year facebook is making money.

Gosh, I wonder who leaked those? I wonder if they were even real or subtly tweaked? Frankly I think Facebook will be about as successful longterm as MySpace, Geocities, eWorld, Yahoo and a bunch of other 'portals' which were due to replace the internet any time soon before the last tech bubble, but even if it is way more successful than those, why should it replace email? Given their public hostility to the concept of privacy, why would you possibly want to trust Zuckerberg and Facebook with your private correspondence?

This IPO is not a game-changer, it's not the start of a new paradigm, and it's not worth $100b, it's business as usual for Goldman Sachs, who see their role as extracting as much real money from the economy as possible while putting in as little as possible themselves - it seems there's an endless line of patsies who are willing to fund their robber-baron lifestyle. Good luck ever getting your money back if you invest in this sucker's game.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[quarterbuck]

They filed the actuals http://sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001326801&owner=include&count=40 Revenues of 3 and something billion and profits of a billion in 2011.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[elrous0]

Then the government will bail them out when they collapse. Because, of course, they're too big to let *fail*.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[mlts]

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.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[Tsingi]

He said "sites", as in "websites", which all rely on the HTTP(S) protocol. IRC is a completely different protocol.

You must be really hurting to correct someone.

Regardless of the magic number in the packet headers, I use IRC as a social network. I don't use FaceBook.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[Mashiki]

I see you're new here. You must not know of a time back when we used the internet as a social medium without having our *names* attached to something. Rather when we cultivated our pseudonyms instead. It worked perfectly fine then.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[flyingsquid]

No idea where you got those numbers come from, but the actual numbers (from the Wall Street Journal) are $606 million in earnings on $1.97 billion in revenues for 2010, and $1 billion in earnings on $3.71 billion in revenue for 2011.

That means 1) Facebook is making a lot of money, 2) Facebook has huge profit margins- about 25-30% profit, and 3) Facebook is growing very, very fast. Those are some damn impressive numbers. Assuming a P/E of 30 or even 40, which is reasonable for a rapidly growing, highly profitable company, that would justify a valuation of 30 or 40 billion dollars.

But a valuation of $75-$100 on $1 billion in earnings implies a P/E of 75 or 100... and that's the kind of P/E ratios you used to see back at the height of the internet bubble. Basically, you're subscribing to the Greater Fool Theory, which is that you'd have to be a fool to buy at those prices... but you can make a profit if you find an even greater fool who buys into the hype, and who will buy at an even higher price. That'll keep going for a while, but sooner or later the company makes a misstep, and people panic because they realize they won't be able to sell the stock at a higher price- the bubble bursts, and then it's a race to the doors. This is what happened with Netflix- it shot up to $300 a share (80 P/E) on at which point a couple of blunders caused the stock to plunge to under $70 in a matter of 6 months.

Facebook might be a decent investment as a company (Zuckerberg seems like the same kind of unstoppable evil genius that Bill Gates used to be back before Gates wussed out and discovered that whole helping-other-human-beings thing) but only if you get at the right price. At half the price, Facebook would probably be a good investment, but at the prices they're talking about, it's speculating, not investing.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[ceoyoyo]

"Here's what I've done on Facebook just today over the last eight hours:"

Hm... not one of those things involve buying things. In fact, your only commercial interaction was blocking an advertisement. I think I'll go with the GP on this one - Facebook is not worth 75 billion.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[kiwimate]

Hmm, Score:5, Insightful. Apparently there are at least three or four moderators who suffer the same overwhelming superiority complex and lack of connection to the real world as you do.

Here are some hints.

1. Yes, it's +5 insightful. No, that doesn't mean it really is insightful.

2. Get over yourself.

3. The geeks I know with more than half a brain have the ability to interact socially, recognize that there's more to life than just geek stuff, and are mature enough to run their lives based on what they want to do and accomplish instead of desperately seeking validation from some smarmy commentary on the internet, of all places.

4. They also have sufficient intelligence to recognize that Slashdot is a social networking site for geeks. Yes, really.

4a. ...and not care, so long as it serves their aim.

A label is just a label. Deal with it.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[moozey]

I miss Myspace too, dude.

Re:Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[flyingsquid]

from the leaked financials last year facebook is making money. I think it was $250 million or so NET profit on revenues of $1.5 BILLION.

for a lot of people facebook is the new contact list and has replaced email for most communication. my gmail is my spam/marketing honeypot these days and social networks are used for communication.

but then again geeks and techies are usually the last ones to GET trends like this.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, MOD PARENT DOWN!!!!! Facebook made a billion dollars in profit in 2011, *not* $250 million. Check the Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-everything-you-need-to-know/ . Just on principle, it pisses me off to no end that this moron is talking out of his ass about stuff he clearly knows nothing about, and has somehow gotten modded to a +5. There's not even an excuse, you could have found the real statistic in 15 seconds on Google instead of just making stuff up.

All I can say is, if completely inaccurate statements like this can somehow get modded to "+5 Insightful", then the basic premise of Slashdot is fundamentally unsound.

Watch it grow.

[lorinc]

And then watch carefuly the bubble explode...

Re:Watch it grow.

[vlm]

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.

Re:Watch it grow.

[Hognoxious]

Who do you think their customers are?

Hint: it's not the twats posting pictures of their butts with cocktail umbrellas sticking out.

Re:Watch it grow.

[Kenja]

I think the bubble will last up till the point where Facebook realizes they have to now disclose to share holders what they do to make money.

Re:Watch it grow.

[tahyk]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/facebook-ipo-because-time-its-different

Countdown to the Social Media Bubble Pop

[GameboyRMH]

Everybody put on your silly glasses and get drunk!

$225

[greap]

Based on that absurd valuation the average Facebook profile is worth $225.

Re:$225

[Hognoxious]

Should be a bull market.

I think you're about half right...

Re:$225

[supremebob]

Umm.... that's a HUGE stretch. Twenty years ago, people were still using CompuServe and Prodigy. Look what happened to them!

Re:$225

[anagama]

Back then, all the online service providers charged quite a lot. I used Delphi because its $20 for 20hrs/mo plan was the best deal going. If I recall, when AOL came out, it was 3 hrs included and then $3/hr after that -- you could also get GeoWorks with AOL, which was neat (and you didn't need to keep AOL to keep GeoWorks) -- AOL had a GUI interface whereas Delphi was text only, but anyway ... nostalgia. Sierra Online, can't recall what that cost -- can't even recall what you could do with it. BBSs were interesting but most of them were long distance for me -- remember 10c/min for a long distance call was a good price? I haven't though about long distance in years -- I wonder how many young people have never even heard of the concept. I'm getting old.

How do the investors get paid?

[cptdondo]

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....

Re:How do the investors get paid?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an IPO. That's kind of the point of it. It's where the company's owners make a killing off of all the suckers who think they can somehow get in on "The Next Big Thing(tm)".

Re:How do the investors get paid?

[grub]

Facebook reportedly has, what, 10% of the world's population? What's its growth model from here?

Farms. Lots and lots of farms.

Re:How do the investors get paid?

[CanHasDIY]

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....

Well, you see, according to the largest private bank in the world, Goldman Sachs, that's precisely how Wall Street is 'supposed' to work.

Your logic and reasoning abilities have no place amongst the powers that be.

Re:How do the investors get paid?

[HornWumpus]

Nobody is being forced to invest.

Fools and their money were lucky to get together in the first place.

That said: I don't understand how they are running this IPO. Don't they usually set an initial offering price? Are they trying to auction the initial shares? I'll start the bidding with a nickle for the lot.

Re:How do the investors get paid?

[ceoyoyo]

Well, here's how it works:

1. You start up a company (or buy into a private stock offering)
2. Build it into something that looks reasonably valuable
3. Hype it to death
4. Do an IPO.
5. Profit!

I'm sure Facebook's (current) shareholders will come out of this very nicely.

Re:How do the investors get paid?

[Lev13than]

That said: I don't understand how they are running this IPO. Don't they usually set an initial offering price? Are they trying to auction the initial shares? I'll start the bidding with a nickle for the lot.

An IPO's price is set just before the shares hit the open market. The vast majority of a company's shares are either owned by current investors (employees, executives, angel funds etc...) or purchased by investment banks as part of the IPO (when all the shares are purchased in advance it's known as a bought deal). This gives the IPO company a guaranteed source of cash and simplifies the whole process. The investment banks then try to maximize their gain by selling their shares to their clients at a higher market price.

As an investor, you go to your bank and put in a request for X shares. You won't know the exact price until you buy, and your request may be fully/partially/not filled at all. Generally the pension funds get first crack (usually at a discount) and small investors are often left to fend for themselves.

By waiting until the last second to set the market rate the investment banks can gauge demand and maximize the revenue they get from selling their shares to their customers. Once the shares are distributed the stock starts to trade on the open market, and anyone can get in. However, strict rules block the vast majority of insiders from selling immediately so demand is heightened by the limited number of shares. That makes the price go up and everyone is supposed to be happy.

In case you missed it in the description above, the average investor is the mark and the company, the investment banks and then pension funds are in on the con.

(This is a bit of simplification but covers the gist of it)

Re:How do the investors get paid?

[stanjo74]

FB is the One Entity that knows about everything that happens in peoples lives. FB can do a lot more with the type of information they have than Google. I'm not saying it's moral, but nothing can stop FB from using the information any way they can make money, especially with new ownership (after the IPO).

Examples:

- Political parties spent $120+ on a vote last elections. How much would a political party pay FB to know the names and contact info of undecided voters or voters who seem to be able to influence others?

- Your dishwasher just broke, you complain about it on FB. How much Sears or BestBuy would pay to be notified this same instance about your misfortune?

- You buy a vacation with Travel Agent 1, go there to find out the hotel is a dump, you bitch about t on FB. How much would TA2 pay to know about this and contact you with an alternative offer?

The possibilities are endless, especially for the new owners with zero moral standards like Goldman Sachs and the likes. The growth will not come from more subscribers, but with ever increasing ways to analyze the information flow.

Re:Shares

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

No; but all the shareholders who aren't major investment banks get their dividends paid out in ZyngaCash and/or Facebook Points...

Re:Shares

[ae1294]

No; but all the shareholders who aren't major investment banks get their dividends paid out in ZyngaCash and/or Facebook Points...

NO I DEMAND BITCOINS!

Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Reads like a rogue's gallery of the financial sector.

Re:Shares

[vlm]

If you become a shareholder, will they use your name and address to spam you with adverts? ;)

I know you're trying to be funny, but yes, yes they will. For /.ers who don't own stocks, every year, heck some places every quarter you'll get a postal spam explaining how they love diversity and BS like that, its all balloons and unicorns at HQ, and they'd love it if you'd boost their price by purchasing more of their stock.

Some of the most hilariously over-PR'd work I've ever seen has been certain electric company annual reports. What an amazing steaming pile.

Google opened at $98 a share...

[tekrat]

If I recall, Google was almost $100 a share when it IPO'ed and I thought that was way too much. So I did not buy, because I couldn't figure out how they were going to sustain that.

Well, I was quite wrong because Google went up to $200 then $300, then $400 and has been at something around $500 a share for the last 6 or 7 years. Crazy.

So, I don't know what to think about Facecrook. On one hand, I find the company utterly despicable. On the other hand, companies that are utterly despicable tend to go up in value -- a lot.

They are going to be the top dog in social media for at least the next 5 years, which is enough time to buy some shares, watch them go up in value, and then sell in about 3 or 4 years with no regrets if it goes up further.

Re:Google opened at $98 a share...

[kaellinn18]

Here's the major difference I see. When Google had its IPO, they were coming out with new services all the time. It wasn't just a search engine. Since then, they've developed Android and have a good share of the cell phone market. Facebook has made... well, Facebook. That's it. Not only that, but every time they have "improved" it, it's almost always made it worse. I don't even use it anymore. Unless Facebook is going to unveil some innovative plan about where they are going, there is zero reason to buy this stock.

Re:Google opened at $98 a share...

[zill]

What was google's market cap when it ipoed?

23 billion USD

Remember, this was back in 2004, when Google was just a search engine. Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Chrome, Google Earth, and Android did not exist yet.

Google's current market cap is 188.77 billion. Is Facebook half as valuable as Google? I guess the market will soon decide that...

Re:Google opened at $98 a share...

[pz]

Ahh, grasshopper, you have forgotten that it is entirely possible to make money from trading stocks in companies you don't like. Forget the political self-consistency that keeps you warm and fuzzy in a delusional bed at night, trading stocks is all about money. Period.

If you believe in a company, that is a sure-fire indication that you should disqualify yourself from buying their stock, because it means you have a biased view. As my stock-broker cousin is fond of saying, people don't lose money in stocks because they're dumb, they lose money because they get emotionally attached.

No one is going to pat you on the back for buying or not buying a given stock. Once Facebook goes on the open market, the right play is to flip: buy immediately, set a stop-loss, and watch as it either goes up and sells at your target, or be thankful that your stop-loss gets triggered when it goes down. If you can spare the effort to actively track it, and it goes up, adjust your stop-loss in real time and then make some money.

The Emperor's New Stock

[ackthpt]

I can't help but feel there's some irrational exuberance at work here. Exactly why is Facebook worth $75 or $100 Billion? Do they have a revenue stream like Google has?

Inspirational

[paiute]

I'm going to look around right now for people to screw and things to steal.

Re:Inspirational

[Thud457]

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.

Its a roundtable of evildoers

[bussdriver]

Anybody notice all the banks involved with the IPO?

Facebook seems a perfect match for them.

Sounds just like MySpace!

[Norny]

Re-read the article, but replace all instances of "Facebook" with "MySpace." This is exactly the opportunity I was looking for! Now it's time for me to move all the money I made from MySpace into the big next thing, Facebook. I'm so glad this is happening, I was starting to think MySpace couldn't go any higher.

Well it's hot and techy, what could go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

No he gets it. Remember AoL? They were the platform of choice to do everything in the 90's, and look how long they lasted as a dominant market force once everybody got tired of their flash and glitz and move on.

I don't give them more than ten years before they are are just another washed up tech company.

leaked by who?

[decora]

guys, until you read 'running money' by andy kessler, you have no idea what a Tech IPO is, why it exists, and who benefits from it.

hint: it's not geeks, it's not investors, and it's not tech.

Re:We have the answer!

[Oakey]

You should have included the entire paragraph as it goes into even more detail than that;

Continued after your paste;

"We intend to use the net proceeds to us from our initial public offering for working capital and other general corporate purposes; however, we do not currently have any specific uses of the net proceeds planned."

So they may do something, but they dno't actually have a plan.

"We may use a portion of the net proceeds to us to satisfy a portion of the anticipated tax withholding and remittance obligations related to the initial settlement of our outstanding RSUs, which will become due approximately six months following the completion of our initial public offering."

Ah, so it'll also go towards their tax bill?

"Additionally, we may use a portion of the proceeds to us for acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies, or other assets. However, we have no commitments with respect to any such acquisitions or investments at this time."

Again, they might buy some stuff, they might not, they don't really know.

What could possibly go wrong?!