It's been a couple of hours since Mark Zuckerberg pulled the fire alarm rang in Facebook's fresh new stock from Menlo Park this morning. While the media is predictably crapping their pants over this whole thing, public opinion seems to fall somewhere between "Why should I care?" and "I'll just have my broker care for me."
In typical rich-kid fashion, Zuckerberg kicked off the festivities by hosting a sleepover/all-night hackathon in the middle of Facebook's campus last night. The hackathon should be a nice last minute reminder to investors that even folks who don't graduate from college can always just become billionaires and hire people to pretend they're still undergrads.
In grown-up land, trading started out a little rough this morning: First there were technical glitches at the Nasdaq, and then scores of potential investors unloaded shares after receiving more than they expected. The surprise surplus and ensuing sales prompted at least one Chicken Little cry from an IPO reporter who called the whole thing "a total disaster". Which seems a little dramatic, even for financial types.
Speaking of dramatic, loud talker Jim Cramer called all the early buyers "moronic" for jumping on the bandwagon in a financial event that is either a "must-see Super Bowl Sunday showdown" or "The Hills, but with more money".
Financial Times Investment Editor James Mackintosh, who has been doing an expert job deadpanning live coverage and doesn't seem to be buying the hype either, offered some twitter analysis:
So $FB at $6 would be a 20x P/E, which seems reasonable for a fast-growing company with no proper business model and terrible governance
— James Mackintosh (@jmackin2) May 18, 2012
And of course, there were suggestions of what Zuckerberg should do with his growing pile of money:
If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I would buy Greece.
— Sam Graham-Felsen (@samgf) May 18, 2012
Finally, since we're all about the social media schadenfreude these days: rip-off gaming company Zynga had to halt trading on their own stock this morning after it took a 13% nosedive. Although that probably doesn't concern CEO Mark Pincus, since he owns an estimated $425 million of Facebook stock.
Anyway, if you're some kind of lazy day trader hoping to see in to the future and figure out where Facebook's stock price will land by the closing bell today, look no further than the crowd wisdom of twitter, which puts the $FB stock at $54.