Facebook celebrates its 8th anniversary this Saturday. According to people familiar with the matter, Facebook is to mark the event with the filing of an initial public offering, which could value the company at around $100 billion.
Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, from online.wsj.com
The web investing boom could raise as much as $10 billion and value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion, says The WSJ. Facebook is about to pick Morgan Stanley, the leading financial services firm to lead the deal, according to people familiar with the matter but spokespeople for Facebook, Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
First launched by Mark Zuckerberg for Harvard University undergrads, the site later opened up to other schools and gathered about 5 million members in just two years. Now, it has more than 800 million users worldwide and this is 40% of all Internet users. It’s expected to reach 1 billion members by August. It’s the number one most-visited site worldwide after Google.
Facebook raised interest among investors since its beginnings, but declined bids from various companies including Yahoo that offer a bid of $1.6 billion. It was very clever, because four years later, the company could be worth nearly 100 times that number.
