The Facebook IPO has certainly not proven to be Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg’s finest moment. The company that was valued at $104 billion at the time of its IPO is now worth $79 billion.
“Zuckerberg was one of the 40 richest men in the world,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “And he’s fallen off that list in a week.”
“I find that incredible, and you know what’s amazing is how nobody is taking any responsibility for that,” he continued.
It seems as though the value of Facebook, regardless of what it may or may not have been, has been lost in a week. Zuckerberg alone has lost $5 billion since Facebook went public.
“You've just destroyed all that value,” Glenn said. “It was paper value, but the money disappeared.”
It is also hard to ignore the change in media coverage over the past week. What started out as breaking news, making headlines all over the place, is now relegated to minor coverage in the business section only – if it receives any coverage at all.
“Have you noticed that the media was all over this. It’s all they could talk about. And now no one is talking about it. Isn’t there something there,” Glenn asked.
“You don't think anybody was in real dark shady territory here,” he continued.
Considering the relationships Glenn has talked about connecting Facebook, the banks involved in the IPO, and the government, it’s not hard to imagine that there have been some potentially shady practices going on.
“You know, we've been talking about things of intrinsic value, and talking about this Facebook IPO which is – you know – I don't know how people are missing things,” Glenn said. “I know it's not just me but it is – it’s amazing how – it’s amazing how people are still in the mode of I can get rich quick.”
Regardless of how bad things seem to have gone for Facebook recently, the growth it has accomplished in such a short period of time remains impressive.
“You have a company here that, again, started in 2004 in a dorm room,” Stu said. “It was built all the way out. I mean, think about the movie. Remember the movie came out a couple years ago, The Social Network. The Social Network came out when Facebook had become so big they were making a movie about how it was founded.”
“They went through the entire movie, this was 2010, and one of the last pieces you see in the movie is to tell you what the valuation of the company is: $25 billion,” Stu continued. “It's still more than three times as valuable than it was two years ago!”
Numbers aside, Glenn still wasn’t convinced.
“Doesn’t this tell you,” Glenn said skeptically. “It’s pets.com. It’s the pets.com syndrome.”