Friday, September 28, 2007

Zuckerberg: Facebook now worth $50 billion. No, $60 billion. Oh wait–


No guff. This baby-faced punk kid has got balls like a gorilla. Few days ago he was turning away Microsoft, saying their offer to buy a piece of Facebook at a $10 billion valuation wasn’t high enough because his profitless company was worth $15 billion. Now he’s telling analysts that the price has gone up again and the company is worth $50 billion. Filthy hack asked him, “Did you say fifteen billion, as in one-five billion, or fifty billion, as in five-zero?” And Faceberg confirms it’s the latter. He says they arrived at the number because they have 40 million members and each one should be worth just over a thousand bucks. Based on what? Who knows. Who cares. Does it even matter? This thing is tethered to reality like a helium balloon is tethered to the earth. Faceberg, you are a bold new breed of Silicon Valley huckster. You make the guys who run Yelp look like amateurs. Namaste. I honor the place where your chutzpah becomes one with reality.

UPDATE: I’ve just been informed that the valuation has gone up again. Just in the time it took me to write this, Facebook has gone to $60 billion. Wow. Bubble 2.0, baby.


Thursday, September 27, 2007

Jolie launches rival bid for Zuckerberg


This just in from some of the Disney people in Los Angeles. Angelina is an avid Facebook user and says no way is she letting Gates adopt Zuckerberg. She’s trying to raise a fund to out-bid Microsoft and bring Zuckerberg down to Los Angeles. “Mark is too cute to be absorbed into the Borg,” she says. “I want him to have a normal life, just like any other kid.” (Again much love to Acid Gurl for the photo.)


Another sign that the end is near


You may recall that last summer News Corp. and Yahoo were supposedly trying to make a deal in which News Corp. would sell MySpace to Yahoo and get a share of the Yahoo business. Talks are back on, according to Rupert. He called up a little while ago to see if I’m going to the next TMWRTW (Twenty Men Who Rule The World) meeting, which is being held in Hawaii next month. We were shooting the breeze when he mentioned that his guys have been holed up with Yahoo guys again. This time they’re proposing News Corp. gets 25% of Yahoo in exchange for MySpace. Not bad considering Yahoo is worth about $40 billion, which means old Rupe will have turned his $580 million purchase of MySpace into a $10 billion asset in just two years. Jerry Yang, meanwhile, gets to look like a man of action (ha ha) and finally gets a piece of the social networking business, which is where all the Internet traffic is going.

Rupert says business at MySpace is booming, couldn’t be better. But trust me, he knows damn well they’re about to get their head blown off by Facebook. Also worth noting: When crafty old Rupe decides that the time is right to start selling things, you know we’re hitting the top on the current bubble. Just saying. Watch out for falling debris. (Photo courtesy of Ian Mangina, US Weekly.)


Just heard from Zuckerberg


He’s like, Dude, look, the way I figure it is that whatever someone is willing to offer me, my company must be worth more, right? I mean if someone wants to pay ten billion for something they’re only going to do that if they think it’s worth more than ten billion, like maybe fifteen billion. But if it’s worth fifteen billion then why should I sell it for ten? But then if they offer fifteen billion I know it’s probably worth twenty or twenty-five billion. You see the quandary we’re in. How do you ever sell something if it keeps going up in value like this? Especially in our case where it keeps going up in value for no apparent reason. And we’ve got all these crooks trying to steal this company out from under me. I mean sure I’m only fifteen years old and my CFO is still in junior high but we’re not stupid, right? I mean I was going to Harvard before I did this. Harvard. Little college back East. Have you heard of it? And what a lot of people don’t know is I was the king of poker in our dorm. Never lost a game. You know why? No, not because I was lucky. Because I was smart, but I acted dumb. And I was really good at bluffing. That helped too. (Photo: Dave Spart, Harvard Crimson.)


Regarding this Microsoft-Facebook deal, aka the world’s most expensive adoption ever


People have been asking me for more than a year now if we’re seeing another crazy dotcom bubble again, only this time with Web 2.0 companies. All I can say is, I thought Yahoo was nuts to offer one billion for Facebook last year. Then I started hearing the team of eighth-graders who are running the company now thought they were worth five billion and I thought, Okay, yes, we’re in a bubble. Now the Borg is offering to invest at a valuation of ten billion, and the nuts running Facebook think they’re worth fifteen billion. Where does it end? Gates keeps bidding, and no matter what he offers, they say they’re now worth more than that? No idea why Gates is doing this except maybe he’s figured out that Facebook is the only company with applications that are more useless and more annoying than Microsoft’s. You’ve got to hand it to Zuckerberg though. Kid has brass balls. And he’s figured out something very essential about the Valley, which is that, deep down, nobody really knows what anything is worth, and nobody really knows which ideas are any good, and everybody’s always driven primarily by fear. So what the money does is hover, waiting to pounce at the last minute and then, if something takes off, acting like they knew all along that this was the Big One.

You have to admit that they do look good together, right? Bill and Zuck, I mean. They should form a club for very expensive yet essentially irrelevant companies. I wish them well. I really do. Now I must get back to the terribly unsexy job of taking over the music, film, television and telecommunication industries. Peace out. (Photo by Acid Gurl.)