FACEBOOK HAS FORMALLY raised the expected price of its shares ahead of its public flotation later this year – to a level which would value the company at above the $100 billion barrier.
In an apparent response to high investor demand, the company has filed new documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States revising its earlier paperwork for its Initial Public Offering.
Having previous priced its shares are somewhere between $28 and $35 per share, the company’s shares are now priced at somewhere between $34 and $38.
Assuming the shares are ultimately priced at halfway between these two levels, at $36, would value the total number of shares being sold off at $12,146,952,672.
The company itself would retain a little over half – $6.48 billion – while existing shareholders, most prominently the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, keeping the rest.
Despite the public flotation of the company, Zuckerberg faces no threat to his ultimate control of the company: because of his holding of ‘Class B’ shares, which carry ten times more voting weight than the regular ‘Class A’ shares being sold, he will still hold 57.3 per cent of its voting rights.
Zuckerberg, who turned 28 yesterday, is to sell 30.2 million shares himself; assuming a sale price of $36, he would net a cash payment of $1.087 billion, while the remainder of his stock would be worth $18.3 billion.
His status makes him one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, but not the youngest: his former Harvard roommate Dustin Moskovitz, who took a part-stake in the company, is the youngest.
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