SEC may force Facebook flotation

Source: The Guardian

Facebook might be forced by US regulators to take the social networking company public as new investors pile in

"It's a lot easier to go public than to be public," observed veteran technology investor Frank Quattrone last year. That insight might prove doubly prophetic for Facebook, which is under fresh scrutiny about when it might take – or be forced to take – the social networking company public following a fresh $500m (£320m) round of investment led by Goldman Sachs that has valued Facebook at $50bn...

Joined by the Russian tech investment firm Digital Sky, which put $50m into the deal, Goldman has structured it as a new investment product. Clients can buy a chunk of Facebook equity by investing at least $2m, and have to agree not to sell shares until 2013 and not to trade in secondary stock markets.

It is a deal that has prompted scrutiny of the rules on US initial public offerings. The securities and exchange commission (SEC) stipulates that firms with more than 499 shareholders must go public, though Facebook won an exemption from this ruling in November 2008 by saying most of its shareholders were staff. Outside Facebook, though, nobody knows for sure how many investors it has.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/04/sec-may-force-facebook-flotation

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Goldman Sachs, everyone's favorite vampire squid, is inking the books for the sociopath-of-the-year and countless insider leeches. Again. Someone tell Timmeth. Oh wait, maybe a blind trust has just shelled out another $2m.

including who owns it. As long as Goldman bankrolls it with the money that they need, Zac can expand as much as he wants to before they all make a killing.

Goldman is betting against its own clients on this deal, too?

Second of all, I love how they've decided to plow ahead with this investment scheme and let everyone else worry about the details later (like that small detail of whether or not its even legal).

And given that facebook doesn't do the traditional advertising, if they go public, I expect that to change. And they will lose the "cool factor" that was much ballyhooed in the movie.

Frankly, facebook hasn't been "cool" for sometime now.

It's as much a part of mainstream now as google.

if it goes public, I see facebook suddenly suffer from top heavy management. There will be a very quiet "cleaning of house" to cut overhead and improve market shares.

Kind of typical of any and all tech type internet corps that go public. I saw it time and time again here in Austin during the "boom", but then again, half of those start ups didn't even have a marketable product.

I give facebook another 5-10 years and it will either implode, be broken up or replaced by the next big mega-internet-corp sensation.