Facebook Now Worth $50 Billion In Secondary Trading

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Monday, November 29th, 2010

It was just a few weeks ago that Accel Partners sold off around half a billion dollars of Facebook shares at a company valuation of $35 billion. If you thought that was insane, and a lot of commenters did, then don’t read the rest of this post. You’ll only get more jealous.

Around $40 million changed hands last week in a Facebook share auction held by SecondMarket. The end price per share was $20.76, and about 1.9 million shares were bought and sold. And based on there being around 2.5 billion shares outstanding after a 5-1 stock split earlier this year, that values Facebook at around $50 billion. As far as we know, this is an all time high.

At a $50 billion valuation Facebook is has more than 1/4th the market capitalization of Google, and nearly 1/4th the value of Microsoft. It’s worth more than eBay and Yahoo as well, and closing on Amazon’s $80 billion valuation.

The email sent out to auction participants is below. A new auction is beginning shortly. We’ve reached out to SecondMarket for comment.

To All Facebook Market Participants:

Thank you for your feedback and participation in last week’s Facebook auction. As we had hoped, there was robust seller and buyer participation — the auction fully cleared at a per share price of $20.76. In addition, there was overwhelmingly positive feedback on the auction process. As a result, we will be continuing to conduct these auctions for the foreseeable future. For this week, the process will remain reasonably similar, with slight tweaks to the timeline. The reserve price for this week will be $20.60, the same as last week.

If you own shares that you are eligible to sell and wish to participate as a seller, please complete the attached Seller Information Sheet and submit it to SecondMarket at fb@secondmarket.com by tonight, Monday, November 29th, at midnight EST.

If you would like to participate as a buyer, please complete the attached Buyer Information Sheet and submit it to SecondMarket at fb@secondmarket.com by Wednesday, December 1st at 12:00 PM EST.

Please see below for more detailed results on last week’s auction and for this week’s auction calendar:

11/22-11/26 Auction Results:

Total Number of Shares Offered for Sale: 1,896,265
Number of Shares Cleared in Auction: 1,896,265
Reserve Price: $20.60
Clearing Price: $20.76

11/29-12/3 Auction Timeline:

· Monday, November 29th at 10:00 AM EST – Auction process commences

· Monday, November 29th at 11:59 PM EST – Seller order forms due

· Tuesday, November 30th at 9:00 AM EST – Buyers informed of share quantity available

· Wednesday, December 1st at 12:00 PM EST – Buyer order forms due

· Wednesday, December 1st at 5:00 PM EST – Participants informed of auction results

· Wednesday, December 1st at 8:00 PM EST – Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers

· Friday, December 3rd at 4:00 PM EST – Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers

· Friday, December 3rd at 7:00 PM EST – Notice to be sent to Facebook, Inc.

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: February 1, 2004
IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Company: SecondMarket
Website: SecondMarket.com
Launch Date: 2004
Funding: $34.2M

SecondMarket is a reinvented stock market. We provide products and services that enable companies, community banks, student loan issuers and funds to manage liquidity, raise capital and communicate with key stakeholders. A Better Market… We’re empowering entrepreneurs by reinventing the modern stock market and redefining the modern company. We’re enabling companies to manage liquidity, communicate with key stakeholders and raise capital through products that give control to companies, not to Wall Street. We’re changing the market,...

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