Skip to main content

A distraught Mark Zuckerberg texted 'Everything is going really badly' before nearly cancelling Facebook's IPO

zuckerberg chanPriscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg.Reuters
Facebook almost cancelled its $16 billion (£12.3 billion) IPO in 2012 because its internal revenue projections were so bad, according to court testimony in a class-action lawsuit.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote the following text to his then-fiancee and now wife Priscilla Chan saying: "Everything here is going really badly. Our revenue projection has gone down so much we now think we might go public at less than $50bn if things continue."


The Financial Times first reported on the court hearing, which took place in Manhattan on Wednesday.

The episode dates from April 2012, when Facebook was struggling to make the switch from desktop into mobile. The company went public in May.

The court heard that Zuckerberg went into a "huddle" with some of Facebook's top executives in a hotel room in New York. He met with then CFO David Ebersman and COO Sheryl Sandberg to discuss whether to float.

When that was over, he then sent another text to his wife saying: "The IPO is on," the court heard. She replied: "Yay".

According to the Financial Times report, investors including the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System are suing Facebook and its underwriters because they allegedly misled investors by failing to disclose that users' switch to mobile was impacting Facebook's revenues. They said the risk had only been described as theoretical.

But Facebook's legal representative, Andrew Clublok, said it wasn't possible for the company to have quantified that risk. Clubok said Facebook's revenues had begun to rebound by the time of the float.

A Facebook spokesman told the newspaper: "We remain confident that our disclosures were complete, accurate, and complied with applicable law."

While Facebook was originally slow to transition to mobile, it quickly evolved to a mobile-first company. By 2013, half its revenues were coming from mobile. It now accounts for 85% of the company's ad revenues.

More@ https://www.technapping.com

Source: Business Insider

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Walmart expands its grocery delivery business, powered by Uber

Walmart is expanding a test of its grocery delivery service, powered by Uber, the company announced this week. The retailer is now offering grocery delivery in two new markets — Dallas and Orlando — which join Tampa and Phoenix as locations where consumers can shop online for grocery items, then opt to have them come to their home for an additional $9.95 fee. Grocery delivery has been something Walmart has experimented with for years, starting with tests in Denver and San Jose of grocery delivery using its own service and trucks. The tests involving Uber are newer, however. In June, 2016, Walmart began a trial in Phoenix, which expanded to Tampa this March. In those locations, Walmart offers grocery delivery at five local stores per market. This week’s Dallas test is larger, with 8 stores participating. In Orlando, there are four stores involved. The grocery delivery service is available via the same online grocery shopping website where customers can place their pick-up orders — a s...

WTF is bitcoin cash and is it worth anything?

Early yesterday morning bitcoin’s blockchain forked — meaning a separate cryptocurrency was created called bitcoin cash . The way a fork works is instead of creating a totally new cryptocurrency (and blockchain) starting at block 0, a fork just creates a duplicate version that shares the same history. So all past transactions on bitcoin cash’s new blockchain are identical to bitcoin core’s blockchain, with future transactions and balances being totally independent from each other. For practical matters, all this really means is that everyone who owned bitcoin before the fork now has an identical amount of bitcoin cash that is recorded in bitcoin cash’s forked blockchain. But it’s not exactly this easy. If you control your own private keys, or hold your bitcoin in an exchange that said it would credit users’ balances with bitcoin cash, you’re fine and can access your newfound cryptocurrency right now. If you held your bitcoin with a provider like Coinbase, which said before the fork t...

Bitcoin breaks $3,000 to reach new all-time high

Bitcoin has reached a record high valuation of $3,000 per coin to complete a rollercoaster week that begin with the long-awaited split of the cryptocurrency. A number of exchanges, including popular destinations Coinbase and Kraken , valued a single bitcoin at over $3,000, an all-time high that is up $485 on the valuation one month ago. Earlier this year, Bitcoin surged to surpass $2,000 for the first time in May going on to almost reach $3,000 in June only for the valuation to crash . Over the last twelve hours, bitcoin’s value has jumped by over 10 percent as forked currency bitcoin cash has seen its valuation crash by 30 percent. Some exchanges including China’s OkCoin even put the value of one bitcoin above $3,200 right now. Finally, the surge means that the total market cap of bitcoin is more than $50 billion — $51,737,289,581 at the time of writing according to Coinmarketcap.com . A Coinbase chart shows bitcoin’s valuation has passed $3,000 per coin One chief concern around t...