From the release - <i>Facebook "expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012."</i><p>TC interpretation - <i>"Clearly, it looks like Facebook plans to IPO no later than April 2012."</i><p>My understanding (worth sharing, if I'm correct, as I think TC's surety in their statement is misleading) is that Facebook can report publicly for as long as they like without having to go through an IPO and list.<p>While they're unlikely to do so indefinitely, I don't think their statement means that "Clearly" they'll be doing an IPO in the next 15 months.
<i>Under the transaction’s terms, Facebook had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from the Goldman Sachs overseas offering, at the discretion of Facebook. While the offering was oversubscribed, Facebook made a business decision to limit the offering to $1 billion.</i><p><i>One has to wonder if the fact that Goldman excluded U.S. investors from the round had to do with Facebook not raising the full $1.5 billion (which would push the total investment to a whopping $2 billion).</i><p>They quoted a statement saying it was "oversubscribed" and that, had Facebook wanted to, they could have chosen to take $1.5b from it... and then analysed that to mean that they were unable to raise $1.5b. What?
Isn't Zuckerberg getting very close to getting his share control to the point where he doesn't retain a ~50% stake along with his staff[1]?<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-who-owns-facebook-2011-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-who-owns-fac...</a>