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Facebook aims for $5 billion in IPO
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about the social-networking site’s new privacy settings in Palo Alto, Calif. Facebook filed Wednesday to sell stock on the open market in what is the most talked-about initial public offering since Google in 2004.
Associated Press
NEW YORK
Facebook made a much-anticipated status update Wednesday: The Internet social network is going public eight years after its computer-hacking CEO Mark Zuckerberg started the service at Harvard University.
That means anyone with the right amount of cash will be able to own part of a Silicon Valley icon that quickly transformed from dorm-room startup to cultural touchstone.
If its initial public offering of stock makes enough friends on Wall Street, Facebook probably will make its stock-market debut in three or four months as one of the world’s most-valuable companies. Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., hopes to list its stock under the ticker symbol, “FB,” on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq Stock Market.
In its regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook Inc. indicated it hopes to raise $5 billion in its IPO. That would be the most for an Internet IPO since Google Inc., and its early backers raised $1.9 billion in 2004. The final amount likely will change as Facebook’s bankers gauge the investor demand.
Joining corporate America’s elite would give Facebook newfound financial clout as it tries to make its service even more pervasive and expand its audience of 845 million users. It also could help Facebook fend off an intensifying challenge from Google, which is looking to solidify its status as the Internet’s most-powerful company with a rival social network called Plus.
The intrigue surrounding Facebook’s IPO has increased in recent months, not only because the company has become a common conduit —for everyone from doting grandmas to sassy teenagers— to share information about their lives.
Zuckerberg, 27, has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds.