Thursday, September 19, 2024

Facebook: Sell or Stay In Bed?

Soon after an ad deal with Microsoft, Facebook is rumored again to be in talks with Yahoo! about a possible $1 billion acquisition – that is, if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg feels like getting out of bed this time.

Facebook: Sell To Yahoo Or Stay In Bed? Will Facebook Sell To The Highest Bidder?
Let’s examine again how much a billion is. If you were to count from one, counting one number per second, you would not finish counting to a billion for 33 years. If you had a billion dollars, you could spend half a million per week, and at the end of 33 years, you’d still have $142 million left. That’s how much a billion is.

The Wall Street Journal published an extensive article about the number 2 social networking site and its 22-year-old founder (yes, 22). Zuckerberg, who discontinued his pursuit of computer science and psychology degrees (translation: undecided) at Harvard, was approached by Microsoft earlier this year about a possible acquisition. His crew informed Microsoft executives that an 8 a.m. conference was a little early.

“I’m in the office at 10:30 a.m. sometimes,” he told WSJ.

Zuckerberg says he doesn’t remember brushing off Yahoo! in March when a billion dollar offer was on the table, negotiations spilling over into the weekend, for his girlfriend.

“I have a girlfriend; when I’m hanging out with her I tend to not be that engaged,” he said.

Was there a kegger or something?

Zuckerberg isn’t the only stakeholder. He owns 30 percent of the company after securing funding from venture capitalists. There are discussions about an IPO, about whether someone will pay $2 billion, about business cards reading “I’m CEObitch.”

That was a joke, says a Facebook spokeswoman.

But honestly, if you were 22 and had the second hottest social networking site on the Internet, would you hesitate to sell out? The WSJ article compared Facebook’s reticence to sell to the early days of Google. Facebook is approaching $100 million annually in ad sales.

But Facebook isn’t a search engine with a potentially limitless audience – it’s not even the most visited social networking site. It’s a hip website that could suddenly go unhip tomorrow – especially if there are any more coups staged. And then where are you in the world of billion dollar offers? Not in it, that’s where.

I say, take the money and run.

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