pre-IPO, means a company that is not publicly traded on the open markets.
securitize (i assume) means to make their stock, or some portion of facebook liquid enough for buy/sell on a market. If there aren't people out there willing to buy or sell facebook that last part won't work.
Shorting something (in financial terms) is to bet against the product. For example, in normal publically traded stocks, you could pay someone to borrow their stocks of a company, sell the stocks off, wait a period of time (duration dependent on deal with original owner), expecting the stocks to loose value, then you rebuy the stocks, hopefully at a lower value. You make the difference between what the stocks started at, and what the ended at, minus the fee for borrowing the stocks.
Shorting stocks is tricky, really only works well over short timelines, and has unlimited downside (unlimited loss potential). For example, if you attempted to short google stock, and then the stock went to some astronomical value, you have to shell out the money to re-buy those google stock to give back to the original owner.
Goldman will soon be offering the public the ability to, basically, buy Facebook stock through an intermediary.
The author would like to make a similar investment, but make it a short, basically sell, bet that the value of the stock will go down, through an intermediary.
In Michael Lewis's _The Big Short_, some of the people buying CDSs (unregulated "insurance") on mortgage backed securities that they didn't own did the trades with brokers that had never done it before, but figured it out.
All it takes is a willing accomplice with the right connections.
Both responses you got were more or less correct, sorry for the jargon. I'm a programmer by trade and passion so I figured most would suss it out, I'll have to watch how much time I spend around people that work in finance in future.
Some minor details:
I want to bet that Facebook is worth way less than people think it is, as in the other responses.
The idea I had in mind doesn't require any liquid ownership in Facebook, but rather that people would bet against me. (Derivative/future, not equity)
securitize (i assume) means to make their stock, or some portion of facebook liquid enough for buy/sell on a market. If there aren't people out there willing to buy or sell facebook that last part won't work.
Shorting something (in financial terms) is to bet against the product. For example, in normal publically traded stocks, you could pay someone to borrow their stocks of a company, sell the stocks off, wait a period of time (duration dependent on deal with original owner), expecting the stocks to loose value, then you rebuy the stocks, hopefully at a lower value. You make the difference between what the stocks started at, and what the ended at, minus the fee for borrowing the stocks.
Shorting stocks is tricky, really only works well over short timelines, and has unlimited downside (unlimited loss potential). For example, if you attempted to short google stock, and then the stock went to some astronomical value, you have to shell out the money to re-buy those google stock to give back to the original owner.