Facebook Keeping Its High-Priced Exit Options Open

from the piles-o'-cash dept

There's been some speculation lately that Facebook is gearing up for an IPO, based on a recent job listing at the company, but it would appear that the Skype billion-dollar buyout plan is still a possibility. New rumors spread by everybody's favorite dot-com analyst, Henry Blodget, say that Microsoft will buy Facebook as a desperate Steve Ballmer looks to get the company some real traction in the social networking and web space. Blodget calls the rumored price of $6 billion a "fly in the ointment." Of course it is: after Yahoo's $1.62 billion offer for Facebook was rejected last year, a Facebook board member quickly said that the site wasn't for sale -- but was worth $8 billion. So going by the Skype plan, since about seven months have passed since that comment, and Facebook's gotten tons of hype since it announced its platform offering (even though page views are off a bit), the going price should be roughly, say, a nice round $20 billion by now. Remember, you heard it here first.
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Filed Under: acquisitions
Companies: facebook, microsoft


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2007 @ 3:17pm

    Industry gossip (any industry) is not interesting, unless you are in that field. Issues are interesting.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 11 Jul 2007 @ 3:37pm

    Perhaps some other website would be more to your liking.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    anonymous coward, 11 Jul 2007 @ 4:15pm

    so what can we do to stop it

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    pete, 11 Jul 2007 @ 6:56pm

    didn't Microsoft already start up (or tried to start) a social networking site in beta testing with a mascot closely resembling the Linux penguin?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Buzz, 12 Jul 2007 @ 8:48am

    I am an avid Facebook user. It is an excellent site! It is professionally laid out, very useful, and quite entertaining. I'm not a huge fan of the applications add-on (I just wish all apps in friends' profiles would collapse to a single "applications" tab), but I fully understand why it is there.

    I am glad that Facebook is so resistant to being purchases. Frankly, if Microsoft bought Facebook, I would quit using it because Microsoft has this nasty habit of programming more features without ever paying any attention to performance issues. On my Ubuntu computer, I had not experienced a system lock-up/freeze/crash in ages; a site's link jumped me to Microsoft.com, and my computer froze. Maybe the situation has changed since then, but Microsoft packs so many dang menus, mouse-hovers, live forms, auto-corrects, etc. that my computer screams for air. No other site gives my computers that much grief.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      mwm, 1 Aug 2007 @ 5:48pm

      Re: Microsoft website

      So you're saying Ubuntu can't handle a complex web page? Hmmm... maybe you could switch to Windows. It seems to handle the web pages at Microsoft (and nearly everywhere else) just fine.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


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