[alexqgb]

That, most likely, was the point. A few months ago, Marc Adreessen credited the proliferation of this kind of market manipulation with the demise of the IPO. In his view, a company as well established as IBM can roll with punches like these, but (for reasons he describes in some detail) fledgeling companies can't. So they stay private until they're big enough to fend off the hedgies who make money by planting and fanning rumors like this.

The macro-problem is that companies are past the steep part of their growth curves before they're public, meaning that the benefits of economic growth flow largely to a small number of pre-IPO investors, and not the broad range of people whose 401(k) plans depend on growth in public markets.

Anyway, the entire interview if really good, and crap like this IBM rumor indicates that he's got a point.

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-a...

[aswanson]

That's interesting...Ben Horowitz said he suffered the same types of attacks from hedge funds; they'd spread a false rumor and because he was under some type of regulatory restriction, he couldn't correct the record unless he simultaneously updated all his institutional investors at the same time. He had to let the rumors ride out...and he only had a 90-100 million market cap. Somebody has to reign in these useless zero-sum fucks.

[draugadrotten]

> he couldn't correct the record unless he simultaneously updated all his institutional investors at the same time.

Hmm, conference calls, twitter, e-mail, web pages. And so on.

Is it really that difficult to issue an update which satisfies this legal requirement.

[aswanson]

Ben is not a dumb guy. I may be dulling out some of the details, but Im sure it was not that simple. Especially since it was about 7 years before the advent of twitter and involved SEC regulatory compliance.