[encoderer]

Facebook has skirted this for a year now. They sold a bloc of shares to, IIRC, Goldman Sachs who runs it like a private equity fund, selling shares of the fund to as many of its rich clients as possible.

In other words, they NAT'ed the shares.

[tim_h]

What does it mean that they "NAT'ed the shares"?

[veyron]

like the networking NAT (network address translation).

To facebook, goldman sachs is a single investor. However, many individual investors are part of that GS banner.

In much the same way, with a NAT, there may be many computers within an internal network (but to the outside world there is a single external IP address)