[Fires]

Has anyone else seen Mark Zuckerberg's laughable rant about how everything is going fine at Facebook?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19566464

He sounds totally busted, he's stammering and sweating - he looks like what he is, a sad, overblown nerd who thinks he's God but is actually a con artist. Facebook shares continue to plunge. How long can it be before this scam gets bought up by some real company?

[Student176]

He was stammering and sweating in another interview too, its probably his personality rather than him trying to hide something.
Also if you where stupid enough to invest in the facebook IPO at $38 especially after Peter Thiel dumped half a billion dollars worth of shares you deserve to loose everything you have.

[sugar-n-spice]

He's naturally socially inept and nerdy, but the Facebook shares valuation is/was a scam and the point is that a sensible business shouldn't buy the shares.

[-WhySoSerious?]

(Original post by sugar-n-spice)
He's naturally socially inept and nerdy, but the Facebook shares valuation is/was a scam and the point is that a sensible business shouldn't buy the shares.

The IPO was priced exactly where Facebook wanted - for them to raise as much money as possible on the day. Naturally, now the market and investors are kicking themselves, because this is what they should have expected.

The reason shares are falling is because Zuckerberg is taking a long term view on facebook as a product. He's not going to do everything they can to quickly monetize, even though that would obviously bring in a lot more revenue and drive the share price back up. He's raising/bringing in money to improve facebook, not the other way around.

Naturally the company is overvalued at current P/E levels, but that's the market evaluation which none of the upper management seems too concerned by. The key focus is on building something sustainable, which shareholders aren't interested in.

[Iamyourfather]

This man has to move his head to blink. He rarely blinked at his Oprah interview. Do you think he's sugar coating the truth?

[Student176]

Zuckerberg is a typical executive, he doesn't care about shareholders, when he realised how stupid people where to value his company at $100bn he took advantage of them to raise as much capital as possible for his company.

Facebook had ~500mn users at IPO, at a $100bn dollar valuation you are essentially saying each user is worth $200, admittedly there is potential for growth, but even that doesn't justify the $100bn valuation, (if fb had the potential of 1bn users would you say each hypothetical future user is worth $100?)

Each facebook user has a residual cost (that is the amount the company has to pay to run the servers to serve each users content) each user also has a potential to make the company money (through advertising).

Given that most of the first world market has been saturated and facebook still isn't making significant profit what makes people think that the 'new' markets (BRIC's) will make facebook any money?

The only way fb can significantly lift their revenue is if they find a new way to advertise to the users they already have.
So that 100 billion dollar valuation is based on Mark and his team figuring out a way to make more money per user that they have to spend (factoring in the growing number poor users in 3rd world countries which drain resources because its not easy to advertise to consumers who don't have that much money).

Obviously the 100 billion dollar valuation was way off and facebook is now only worth 41.6bn dollars which seems a lot more sensible.
To be fair most people who lost money on the initial 100bn dollar valuation where retail users (normal people who decided to invest their own money rather than hedge fund managers and stock traders). I'm sure the bankers had a lot of fun screwing those idiots over.

[Fires]

Agree with many of the comments so far, I just got the impression that Zuckerberg looked more rattled and slightly losing it than in previous public performances. He is showing the strain and he particularly started rambling when he got onto mobile platforms, where the Facebook story is not very good.

[ch0llima]

Facebook Inc. is at serious risk of going bust with Zuckerberg in charge. He should do what Larry Page and Sergey Brin did - step aside and let a proper CEO, with a proven business pedigree, take over. Long term, there's a risk that Facebook will be bought out as a going concern and stagnate much like MySpace and Digg have done before them. The novelty has worn off and people are getting seriously fed up of it.

Google have gone from strength to strength under Eric Schmidt.

[partoftheweekend]

(Original post by ch0llima)
Facebook Inc. is at serious risk of going bust with Zuckerberg in charge. He should do what Larry Page and Sergey Brin did - step aside and let a proper CEO, with a proven business pedigree, take over. Long term, there's a risk that Facebook will be bought out as a going concern and stagnate much like MySpace and Digg have done before them. The novelty has worn off and people are getting seriously fed up of it.

Google have gone from strength to strength under Eric Schmidt.

How the hell are they going to go bust? They just raised $10 billion in cash from their IPO. Their corporate governance leaves a lot to be desired but you could say their CFO just did an amazing job.

[Drunk Punx]

(Original post by ch0llima)
Facebook Inc. is at serious risk of going bust with Zuckerberg in charge. He should do what Larry Page and Sergey Brin did - step aside and let a proper CEO, with a proven business pedigree, take over. Long term, there's a risk that Facebook will be bought out as a going concern and stagnate much like MySpace and Digg have done before them. The novelty has worn off and people are getting seriously fed up of it.

Google have gone from strength to strength under Eric Schmidt.

See what you think of this, it's sort of relevant. A very interesting read, relevant or not.

[Fires]

(Original post by ch0llima)
Facebook Inc. is at serious risk of going bust with Zuckerberg in charge. He should do what Larry Page and Sergey Brin did - step aside and let a proper CEO, with a proven business pedigree, take over. Long term, there's a risk that Facebook will be bought out as a going concern and stagnate much like MySpace and Digg have done before them. The novelty has worn off and people are getting seriously fed up of it.

Google have gone from strength to strength under Eric Schmidt.

This is true, Zuckerberg looked like a charmless, slippery oink, out of his depth and stumbling, unable to face the challenges of a big corporation. I think the stock will continue to slide almost regardless now until he goes. Of course, he will still be absurdly rich even if he does, having cashed in bigtime - quite a scam given that Facebook is basically worthless as it has no model for making money that does not involve pissing off most of its users.

[tehforum]

(Original post by ch0llima)
Facebook Inc. is at serious risk of going bust with Zuckerberg in charge. He should do what Larry Page and Sergey Brin did - step aside and let a proper CEO, with a proven business pedigree, take over. Long term, there's a risk that Facebook will be bought out as a going concern and stagnate much like MySpace and Digg have done before them. The novelty has worn off and people are getting seriously fed up of it.

Google have gone from strength to strength under Eric Schmidt.

Digg just died after they changed the website drastically.

Why oh why did they do it?

[kka25]

Incidentally, what ever happened to MySpace and Friendster?

[partoftheweekend]

(Original post by Fires)
This is true, Zuckerberg looked like a charmless, slippery oink, out of his depth and stumbling, unable to face the challenges of a big corporation. I think the stock will continue to slide almost regardless now until he goes. Of course, he will still be absurdly rich even if he does, having cashed in bigtime - quite a scam given that Facebook is basically worthless as it has no model for making money that does not involve pissing off most of its users.

Why is it a scam? If investors didn't want facebook shares then they didn't need to buy them. Nobody forced anybody to do anything. People need to take ownership for their own stupid decisions.

Buying when it was around $18/share, which a few people called was a great idea. You would've made around a 20% return already.

[f1mad]

(Original post by ch0llima)
Facebook Inc. is at serious risk of going bust with Zuckerberg in charge. He should do what Larry Page and Sergey Brin did - step aside and let a proper CEO, with a proven business pedigree, take over. Long term, there's a risk that Facebook will be bought out as a going concern and stagnate much like MySpace and Digg have done before them. The novelty has worn off and people are getting seriously fed up of it.

Google have gone from strength to strength under Eric Schmidt.

It isn't going to go bust. He took Sean Parker's advice when he was the founding President of Facebook - look where it's got him.

Fact of the matter is, Facebook right now is too big to go bust.

[Fires]

(Original post by f1mad)
It isn't going to go bust. He took Sean Parker's advice when he was the founding President of Facebook - look where it's got him.

Fact of the matter is, Facebook right now is too big to go bust.

Well not bankrupt, but not surviving as an independent company - it will get taken over by a media giant or Amazon or someone as a sales channel. The ideal partner would be someone like that, who could use the keywords to link to their products. At the moment the site has no hope of making money on the scale they need any other way. Another possibility would be LinkedIn, or LinkedIn-style charging.

[Fires]

(Original post by partoftheweekend)
Why is it a scam? If investors didn't want facebook shares then they didn't need to buy them. Nobody forced anybody to do anything. People need to take ownership for their own stupid decisions.

Buying when it was around $18/share, which a few people called was a great idea. You would've made around a 20% return already.

It was a scam in that they hype around it was passing it off as an exciting new commercial prospect on the scale of Google or Apple, whereas in reality it was nothing like, not even close, to Google.

Groupon was just the same - hyped to the max by Goldmans and the other shyster banks and now on the inexorable slide to worthlessness.

[partoftheweekend]

(Original post by Fires)
It was a scam in that they hype around it was passing it off as an exciting new commercial prospect on the scale of Google or Apple, whereas in reality it was nothing like, not even close, to Google.

Groupon was just the same - hyped to the max by Goldmans and the other shyster banks and now on the inexorable slide to worthlessness.

The banks are paid by facebook to drum up as much interest as possible in the IPO, they did their jobs well.

If speculators bought at the IPO price its because they thought they could make a profit out of a investor bubble not because its intrinsic value was above $38 a share. If people were comparing it to google or apple then they had no idea what they were talking about, the IPO was at 60 times the next years projected earnings compared to about 15 for other. Unfortunately there just wasn't enough upward pressure and these people lost out. Speculating is risky.

Like I said before it's your own fault (or your financial advisor) if you lost money.

Not a scam.

[f1mad]

(Original post by Fires)
Well not bankrupt, but not surviving as an independent company - it will get taken over by a media giant or Amazon or someone as a sales channel. The ideal partner would be someone like that, who could use the keywords to link to their products. At the moment the site has no hope of making money on the scale they need any other way. Another possibility would be LinkedIn, or LinkedIn-style charging.

No they don't: they need to crack a way to make the advertising platform work on a mobile device.

[Fires]

(Original post by f1mad)
No they don't: they need to crack a way to make the advertising platform work on a mobile device.

He claims that's their only problem, but it isn't - all the major analysts say they aren't making anything like the revenue they need from their site as-is - the mobile issue is just a sign that they also aren't progressing forwards as the technology moves on. As I say, another Groupon or MySpace. There is actually no reason why it won't fizzle out.

One big problem that lies ahead is that whoever takes over the business will inherit a huge amount of confidential information that people the world over, particularly young people, have placed on it. The scope for misusing this is vast. As it could easily end up in the hands of Russian Oligarchs, drug barons and corrupt nations like Arab states, this is rather a chilling prospect.