Facebook to File Wednesday For $5 Billion IPO
- February 01, 2012
- Bradley Taylor
Facebook is expected to file initial paperwork with regulators on Wednesday morning for a $5 billion initial public offering.
The social networking site has hired five underwriters, with Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS – News) taking the lead role.
Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS – News), Bank of America Merrill Lynch (NYSE: BAC – News), Barclays Capital and JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM – News) round out the initial list of underwriters on the deal.
The company is currently looking at a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion, which would be one of the largest initial public offerings in U.S. history.
The IPO has spurred competition among retail investors wanting to own as many shares as possible.
“To the extent that there is any bubble in technology at all, it is really a bubble around Facebook in the sense that there is a huge amount of pent-up demand among retail investors for access to Facebook equity,” said Sean Parker, Napster co-founder, in an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The current winner in the race for Facebook equity, with nearly $500 million, is Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, head of investment group DST.
Milner, who also own a stake in Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA – News), Twitter, and Groupon (NASDAQ: GRPN – News), called Facebook a “transformational” company that would continue to grow after going public, in an interview with CNBC on Friday.
-Reported by Kayla Tausche
Here at Olympusweb we think that they better hope and pray that the disastrous solar flares or some other internet infrastructure failure doesn’t wipe out the internet as prophesied by some folks. Facebook would go from a multi-Billion dollar company to a $5 million dollar company instantly and people would lose a great deal of money. This is the problem we see with investing heavy in virtual assets over long periods of time.
