U2 rocker bono is about to make $1 billion, thanks to his 2009 investment in Facebook. Bono’s investment company Elevation Partners bought $210 million worth of shares in the social networking site almost two years ago.
This week, the site has been valued at $65 billion, meaning that Bono and his company’s share of the business is now valued at a whopping $975 million.
U2 are already one of the world’s highest-earning groups, pulling in more than $736 million on their recent 360 Tour.
To put his possible wealth into perspective – currently Sir Paul McCartney, is the richest rock star in the world with a wealth estimated at $600 to $750 million.
After arriving from rival Google in 2008, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s second-in-command has helped grow its 70 million user base into over 750 million active “friends” today, representing about 11% of the world’s population. The Harvard MBA served as chief of staff for the U.S. Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, and managed Google’s online global sales and operations as a vice president. One of few prominent women in tech, Sandberg has been vocal about empowering women. “We still haven’t achieved the goal of real equality for women in the workplace and men in the home,” she wrote in an August op-ed. “We can–we must–do better.”
“Larry Summers taught me early in my career, you want to work for the absolutely smartest people you can, and Mark Zuckerberg definitely falls to that category,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO tells Forbes. “People like Mark come around once in a decade, once in a generation, who have such a strong view of where the world is going, or should be heading and then the tenacity and the determination to actually create that world.”
Meet the unlikely Facebook millionaire. In 2005, graffiti artist David Choe was hired to paint murals on the walls of Facebook’s first offices in Palo Alto, Calif., by then Facebook’s president Sean Parker. As pay, Parker offered the San Jose artist a choice between cash in the “thousands of dollars,” or the equivalent in stock. Choe, who has said that at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was “ridiculous and pointless,” decided to pick the option of Facebook stock. With the upcoming Facebook IPO, Choe’s payment will be valued at $200 million. In reaction to this news, he called himself “the most highest paid decorator alive” on his blog. “Like” Choe on Facebook, and take a look at his Facebook murals:
Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.
They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.
A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses “in the wild” outside a laboratory.
The participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days so they could message back whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength (up to irresistible), whether it conflicted with other desires and whether they resisted or went along with it. There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 “desire episodes” reported.
“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Hofmann. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting “pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations”.
The researchers found that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. Their paper says highest “self-control failure rates” were recorded with media. “Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money.”
The academics, who included one each from Florida State University and Minnesota University, said the subjective reporting of desire was relatively low for tobacco, alcohol and coffee, apparently challenging “the stereotype of addiction as driven by irresistibly strong desires”.
They added: “Resisting the desire to work when it conflicts with other goals such as socialising or leisure activities may be difficult because work can define people’s identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked.”
Hofmann told the Guardian: “Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.
“With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”.
Hofmann added: “We made clear to participants that answering the BlackBerrys did not count. Also people really did not feel a desire to use them – they only beeped once in a while and, if anything, that was more annoying than pleasing, I guess. And there was nothing else they could use the devices for.”
Würtzburg had been the testing ground because he had worked there as an assistant professor until recently.
About time too. Facebook is on the point of filing papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in preparation for its long-awaited initial public offering. This is both big news and no news at all.
It’s big news because, as a friend who works on Wall Street tweeted yesterday, a Facebook initial public offering (IPO) is to Wall Street what a pony is to a little girl. So excited is the financial world about what the Wall Street Journal calls the “Big Kahuna of stock listings“, that the NYSE and the Nasdaq are fighting like rabid dogs to host the listing. To keep people guessing, Facebook has reserved the ticker symbol $FB on both exchanges.
Meanwhile Facebook’s IPO is no news at all because, well, we’ve all been talking about it for years. In fact Facebook has been around for so damn long – and is so damn high profile – that it’s almost a surprise to hear it’s still privately owned. The beyond-healthy secondary market for the company’s shares only adds to the illusion that it’s already a public company: private trading of Facebook stock on Sharespost.com currently values Zuckerberg’s empire at $84bn (£53bn). Some analysts – or at least enthusiastic bloggers – are predicting a valuation hitting $100bn when the company IPOs.
We’ll know for sure soon enough. We’ll also know how much money the company makes selling ads next to all of our embarrassing party photos and banal status updates. Spoiler alert: it’s a shedload..
But first Facebook has to enter its mandatory quiet period – where everyone closely involved in the company has to keep their collective mouth shut as potential investors, the media and regulators dig around in the company’s business and figure out if there’s anything important we should know before we buy shares. For recent Silicon Valley IPOs such as Groupon and Zynga the quiet period has been a tragedy wrapped inside a comedy. And not least because Valley CEOs don’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “quiet”.
When Zynga CEO Mark Pincus faced a roomful of investors in December – days before his company went public – he gleefully informed them that Zynga would likely double its number of paid subscribers. The announcement left financial commentators aghast – the prediction wasn’t in the company’s prospectus and is precisely the kind of thing that CEOs aren’t supposed to say during a quiet period. Still Pincus’s ballsy prediction did little to boost Zynga’s prospects – despite being a hugely profitable enterprise (those virtual goods quickly add up), the stock dropped 5% on its first day and has consistently traded below its $10 offer price. Or as Forbes put it when reporting those numbers: “Zynga IPO goes SplatVille“. The reason for the failure? Forbes suggested that the market simply wasn’t sure how long the world will continue to buy imaginary tractors to tend digital crops.
And then there’s Groupon: the discount group-buying site thing that originally priced at $20 at a share, enjoyed a day-one increase of 31% but is currently trading back down at $19.6. Like Zynga’s Pincus, Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason is a renowned loudmouth. When, as often happens, critics took advantage of Groupon’s quiet period to write negative reviews of the company, Mason came up with a breathtakingly ham-fisted way of fighting back. He wrote a series of “private” memos to staff addressing the criticisms – memos which, wouldn’t you know it, ended up being leaked to the press. The SEC was, to put it mildly, unamused.
So, given the, uh, shaky track record of recent Valley IPOs, are we likely to see Facebook crash and burn? Or can we at least look forward to fireworks during the quiet period? Actually, probably not. For one thing, despite what you might have seen in that ridiculous movie, Mark Zuckerberg is no Mark Pincus or Andrew Mason. Even when not bound by a quiet period, Zuckerberg is notoriously tight-lipped in making statements about his company. Only very rarely, say when a mob armed with burning torches is marching towards his office over changes to Facebook’s privacy settings, does Zuckerberg force out a terse statement explaining himself. Hell, he probably can’t wait to be legally barred from speaking.
But even if Zuckerberg was mindful to respond to critics, it’s hard to know what’s left to respond to. Facebook has been more carefully scrutinised than a three-time presidential candidate. There have been dozens of books, tens of thousands of articles and all kinds of legal scrutiny over the years. The company’s scandals have all been covered and re-covered to the point where there’s barely anything left to know.
Finally, unlike Zynga or Groupon or most other high-profile tech IPOs, there’s not much chance of Facebook going out of fashion any time soon. We’ve been declaring Facebook “over” for many years now but it stubbornly refuses to become unpopular. Instead it has slowly become the de facto login for so many services that it’s hard to imagine life without it.
So, while Wall Street might be salivating over the events of the next few months, and while the few major shareholders who haven’t already cashed out are about to get very rich, for the rest of us there’s likely to be only one surprising thing about Facebook’s IPO. And that’s just how dull a $100bn flotation can be.
The Facebook IPO is upon us… Want to get in and acquire Facebook stock? Here’s the details of the Facebook IPO, which will be filed next week. Facebook — which will likely raise up to $10 billion in its offering – — is on track to be the largest Internet I.P.O. on record, besting Google’s $1.67 billion offering in 2004. “It’s inevitable,” said Sean Parker in an interview with DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC this week. “There’s a possibility that it will be the largest offering in history.” This IPO will make Mark Zuckerberg the richest man in the universe. Would you “like” Facebook stock? Via the WSJ:
Facebook Inc. could file papers for its initial public offering as early as next week, people familiar with the matter said, as anticipation mounts for what is likely to be one of the biggest debuts for a U.S. company.
The deal, seen as defining moment for the latest Web investing boom, could raise as much as $10 billion and value the social network between $75 billion to $100 billion, said people familiar with the matter. A valuation of $75 billion would be below earlier expectations.
The website, which in less than eight years has attracted more than 800 million members, has changed the way people across the globe communicate, from organizing political protests to sharing baby pictures.
he Internet giant is close to picking Morgan Stanley to lead the deal, these people said. Wall Street banks, many of them struggling amid a crimp in trading profits, have been jostling for a leading role in the deal, which could yield them tens of millions of dollars in banker fees, potential new business and bragging rights.
A nod for Morgan Stanley would mark a disappointment for rival Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which a year ago was viewed as having an edge to lead the deal. One person familiar with the matter said that while Morgan Stanley would likely land the coveted “lead-left” spot on an IPO financial filing, Goldman would also likely play a significant role.
Spokespeople for Facebook, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
Facebook could file documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission as early as this coming Wednesday, said one person familiar with the matter. But that timing is just one scenario Facebook executives are considering, the person said. Executives are also considering filing a few weeks later, the person said.
People familiar with the matter have said the company is targeting an IPO sometime between April and June.
A $10 billion Facebook offering would rank fourth among IPOs for U.S. companies, behind Visa Inc., General Motors Co. and AT&T Wireless, according to Dealogic. It would rank Facebook as the biggest U.S. Internet offering ever, replacing Google Inc., which raised $1.9 billion in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation.
At a $100 billion valuation, Facebook would be worth about the same as McDonald’s Corp. and nearly half of Google.
Facebook’s revenue is driven by its advertising business, as big brands rush to the site to interact with consumers through display ads and fan pages. Facebook has been able to increase its world-wide advertising revenue from $738 million in 2009 to $3.8 billion in 2011, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer. It isn’t known if Facebook is profitable.
Facebook’s final valuation will be determined by a variety of factors, people familiar with the matter said, such as investor demand for social media, the IPO market and the health of the European economy.
The IPO will mint a new generation of Silicon Valley millionaires on the level not seen since Google’s offering. Some 3,000 people work at Facebook.
An IPO will also test the ability of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, age 27, to manage a global company whose financial performance will be scrutinized every three months by investors. Mr. Zuckerberg started the company in 2004 out of his Harvard University dorm room. Overall, about 500 million users now log into the site daily, according to Facebook.
Mr. Zuckerberg had been reluctant to push forward with an IPO. People familiar with his thinking said he has been fearful of the damage an IPO could do to the company’s culture. He wants employees focused on making great products, not the stock price, they said.
But outside forces are partly pushing his hand. Facebook executives began to realize in 2010 that Facebook would have more than 500 shareholders by the end of 2011, which would trigger a regulatory requirement that Facebook start publicly reporting financial information.
Mr. Zuckerberg decided it made more sense for Facebook to go public and reap some financial benefit from an IPO, rather than stay private but have to release its financial information, said people familiar with his thinking.
Leading the Facebook sale would be a huge win for Morgan Stanley, which last year cemented its position as the top Internet stock underwriter by leading the IPOs of LinkedIn Corp., Groupon Inc., and Zynga Inc. The bank’s global tech banking team, led by Michael Grimes and Paul Chamberlain, is also based in Menlo Park.
Google + has just spilled over to Google search results. Launched today, Google’s new search option integrates results pulled from Google+ social network connections into Google search queries, a major step into providing relevant social content into the company’s main search product. As the Official Google blog adds:
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Facebook is to encourage users to take their virtual brand into the real world with the launch of a new service enabling them to create personalised business cards based on images and posts from their profile.
The new service, called Facebook Cards, is being positioned as a “new model of social-business networking” that “bridges the gap between online and offline”.
Facebook Cards, which will become available for the social networking giant’s 800 million-plus users globally from 5pm on Thursday (GMT), has been developed in conjunction with UK-based digital printing business Moo.com.
Moo.com, which is based in the so-called Silicon Roundabout in east London that counts companies such online music service 7Digital as inhabitants, is offering the first 200,000 Facebook users 50 free personalised business cards to promote the service. The standard cost for 50 cards will be £10.
The social networking giant believes that the time is right to launch the service because users will be able to make creative business cards thanks to the launch of the new Facebook Timeline product late last year.
Facebook Timeline – which founder Mark Zuckerberg called “the story of your life” when he unveiled a preview to developers in September – replaces the Wall each user’s profile previously had with the aim of documenting their life from the cradle onwards.
“Timeline helps people tell their story on Facebook and feature the parts of their life that mean the most to them,” said Jillian Stefanki, a spokeswoman for Facebook. “The Moo.com integration makes it possible for people to take the same experience with them offline.”
Moo.com, launched in 2006 by entrepreneur Richard Moross, said that each of the business cards can feature a different photo image on the front and a favourite quote or saying on the back.
The aim, says Moross, is to allow Facebook users to have a unique stock of business cards to pair the “right images for the right business or social occasions”.
“It is clear that consumer habits of sharing business and personal information are evolving,” said Moross. “The lines between online social networking and offline business networking are not just blurring, but vanishing.”
He described the new hybrid offering as an “offline social business card”.
Moo.com has raised more than $5m (£3.2m) in venture capital from companies including the Accelerator Group, Index Ventures and Atlas Venture, investors behind internet ventures such as Skype, Betfair, LoveFilm, Last.fm and MySQL.
As we reported previously in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Luxury Vacation in Vietnam: “Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Priscilla Chan spent Christmas Eve in the popular tourist destination Ha Long Bay, local official Trinh Dang Thanh says. The couple spent Christmas Day at an ecolodge in the northern mountain town of Sapa and rode a buffalo, said Le Phuc Thien, deputy manager at Topas Ecolodge.”
However, on the Topas Ecolodge Facebook page, the resort is being very shy. They wrote a status update and stated: “Thank you for your interest in regards to the stay of Mr. Zuckerberg and friends at Topas Ecolodge. For respecting the privacy of our guests, we are sorry for not being able to provide any news about their stay. This is also our criteria to offer a nice private relaxing vacation to our guests. We wish Mr. Zuckerberg and his friends an excellent and unforgettable vacation in Vietnam.”
Here’s more information on the luxury resort:
Topas Ecolodge is a responsible and sustainable lodge situated in the spectacular Sapa valley in the northern Vietnam. Topas Ecolodge has 25 separate bungalows laying around on a hill top each with a private balcony facing the valley. Topas Ecolodge is the perfect place for relaxing, trekking and mountain biking. Click here for a photo tour of the resort.
