[robbiep]

I agree with your point about every techcrunch etc saying what 'facebook NEEDS to do' - as if you can judge the failure/success of a company 3 months post IPO on the value of a stock.

I continue to disagree with you about this fucking Zuckerberg/Employees etc. They have turned paper money into real money. They have lost - psychologically - some unreal money in their freeze period (BTW I was not aware of this, I am much more familiar with Australian securities law). The ~70 Billion of shares from outside investors (Guestimate, I don't know how much stock was retained by employees) - has capitalised the company however, and these are the people who are getting b*tchsplapped by the invisible hand.

With regard to IPO as you are preparing to grow - yes. But that just highlights the nature of IPOs in a bubble. As another poster said, they have managed to significantly capitalise the company despite the fact that rational investors have subsequently brought the share price back to something that (they consider) is more properly the fair value. the idea that a shareprice should skyrocket post IPO is a fallacy that goes against the Efficient Market Hypothesis - i.e. that in the long run you can't achieve returns that are greater than the average market return. This same fallacy is what most 'uninformed' investors are investing in the market under - and it is the existence of these investors that allows informed investors to make a killing on their behalf - in this case, Merrill (and assumably lots of others) by shorting the stock.