[jasode]

>This is because that FB never had to raise serious^ money. Put another way, it does not cost money to make a FB.

Even considering your footnote about market cap, it was actually very expensive to run Facebook.

Facebook started in 2004 and didn't turn a profit until 2009. For more than 5 years, they were burning investors' cash on infrastructure. They quickly burned through the 2005 $12.5 million investment from Accel.

Probably the #1 stress on infrastructure costs was photos. In 2005, Facebook added a feature for people to upload unlimited photos. They soon had more photos than Flickr. As we've seen from other flavor-of-the-month photo bucket websites that crashed & burned by getting overloaded traffic from reddit users, hosting billions of images is not cheap.

[dalbasal]

Did all of that go into running FB? No cash outs for early employees/investors?

In any case, that is still a small portion of their eventual market cap (2%). Also, they had it. It was cheap money. Why not spend it. If they didn't have it, they may have had to create a revenue stream or control costs a little. Running for years before considering revenue or cost control is a luxury.

When you're cashed up, you get spendy.

But, point taken. It's all matter of degrees. It did cost something to make FB. It just wasn't much compared to most companies its size.