Zuckerberg, Facebook and the IPO. Did We Create a Monster?

By Financial Corespondent: Nolan Vannucci

Now that the Superbowl and football season is over, lets get back to one of the more important things in life: Money.


Most people reading this probably get a W-2, work an hourly job, or get paid salary, but what I am going to discuss in how people make the big bucks. Hopefully this will inspire some, open eyes to others, and educate the rest.

What better way to kick off this segment than talk about something that is relevant to each and everyone of us: Facebook

Lets be honest, before there was twitter, Facebook was king. It still is king for pregnant girls, baby mommas, thirsty males, and or course Farmvillle. If it wasn’t for family members who live in other states (and the occasional stalking sessions) I would stick to twitter 100% of the time.


So how am I going to relate Money to Facebook. Hell, if anything the time we all used to spend on Facebook we could have been making money, a lot more of it.

Unless you were living under a rock for the past two weeks, you should know Facebook is taking its company Public. I am going to break it down in Layman’s terms how this happens and the money involved with this particular IPO.

Before they decided to become Public and file their paperwork with the SEC, most of the Financials relating to the company was all here say, or private. People speculated to no end on what the company was worth, that Zuckerberg was a fucking trillionaire, etc, etc,


Now that they laid out the paperwork, we know the cold hard facts about the company, how much they make, and how they intend to make more.


Before I dig into that I want to get your brain wet with numbers and get your creative juices flowing. These statistics were listed in their S-1 (registrations paperwork)

845 million – Number of ACTIVE monthly users

100 Billion – Number of friendships on Facebook

250 Million – Numbers of Photos uploaded everyday

2.7 Billion – Likes and Comments everyday



Now you can see why Facebook is the number 1 most visited site, and has the most page views by far in the world, and its not even close. (www.thestreetevol .com came in at 4th place) Note: Half of the 2.7 billion likes and comments are tied to engagement photos and ultrasounds (not really, but really)



I took the liberty of reading over the paperwork (more like skimmed), to provide you some of the hard numbers about the company. See Below:

In 2011, they had 3.7 billion dollars in revenue.

In 2011, they had 1 Billion dollars in income

Revenue – expenses = income . The sad thing is, that equation probably helped 50% of you.



So what was all this talk about it being a 50 fucking billion dollar company or a 100 billion dollar company. It was just a bunch of dipshits trying to act like they know more than they do, of course in the end, they will likely be right. But lets not be mistaken, being the #1 website in the world could easily raise their revenues to that in a few years or so, they just have to figure out a way to do it.


The main growth of Facebook comes from User Growth, or New Users, mainly in Asia, and other developing nations. With 845 million users, they have some room to grow, especially with China popping babies out like a lottery ball machine. Keep in mind that the population of the world is set to reach 7 billion any day now.


Facebook now, mainly makes its money from ads, and will continue to make a majority of its money from them. You know those ads on the side that take about weight loss, making money, dating, etc. and how they creepily relate to your life. That is because they do. They take the information from your browsing history, cookies, caches, temporary internet files, etc. and put ads on your Facebook page that are similar to what you have been browsing about. Kind of creepy huh? Next time look at it as a reality check.


Another small, but funny note to make is that Facebook makes 12% of its money from Zynga. What is Zynga you ask,? the maker of Farmville and all those other corny ass games. For those of you doing the Math at home that is 444 million.



What does this IPO bring?



Simply put : 5 Billion Dollars That is what they are looking to raise. What better way to do it, then ask the public of America to buy into his company.



So what are all the articles saying Zuckerberg is worth 20 billions, etc, etc. Relax, I’ll explain.

Facebook needs an underwriter to go public. (Morgan Stanley) Actually in their case there are multiple underwriters, but Morgan Stanley is the lead underwriter. They sell Common Stock to the underwriters. (500 million shares x $20 = 5 billion) Morgan Stanley then turns around and sells them to their clients at a Markup, $22 a share, essentially making $2 a share. Now the clients who bought the shares (the ultra fucking rich ones, people like you or I could never get a share) of Morgan Stanley and the other underwriting firms own the 500 million shares in their brokerage accounts, right before the company trades public on the stock market. What happens when an IPO hits the market, especially when it is possibly the hottest IPO ever, the price goes through the roof, say 40-60$ a share within a day. Not out of reach at all. Now the people who were ‘in’ on the IPO just make a ton of fucking money and Zuckerberg’s worth just went through the fucking roof. See, the people who started Facebook are allowed to keep shares for themselves based on their percentage of ownership of the company. Therefore, when the stock price goes up, so does Zuckerberg’s Bank Account. Meaning he now owns 50% of a company who just raised 5 billion from the underwriters, and then had the value double of triple on the stock market. You can do the math on that one. (I want you to keep in mind the numbers in this paragraph are made up for an example, but trend very closely to what really happens. The actual numbers on the per share price has not been released yet, but is exactly how it goes down and how he will make his billions) This is how Investment Banking and underwriting works, and I tried to make it as simple to understand as I possibly could.

So Zuckerberg could come out of this, at the tender age of 27, worth 15-20 billion.



FaceSmash, the original idea behind Facebook started October 28, 2003. The company believes that it will trade Publicly May 1st, or right around then.

That is 3,107 days between when he started the company and then when he will be worth roughly 15 Billion

4.8 million dollars a day

$201,000 / hour

$3,352 / minute

Now get back to work.