Texas Startup Blog written by Alexander Muse

Facebook has lost 80% of its value?

November 24, 2008

If the reports are accurate, Facebook executives offered Twitter’s investors $500,000,000 in Facebook stock to purchase the microblogging company.  Half a billion for a startup without any sort of revenue model - amazing.  The deal fell through for a ver simple reason: Twitter’s investors weren’t sure $500,000,000 in Facebook stock as worth $500,000,000.  Twitter’s investors have bet $20,000,000 on the company and would surely accept a 10x return in today’s market (i.e. $200MM in stock).  So I suspect Twitter’s investors didn’t think the stock was worth even 50% of that number or they would have taken the deal.  The walkaway number would likely have been $100,000,000 - i.e. I don’t think Twitter’s investors would have taken the deal at that number.  Facebook’s most recent valuation was $15 billion - Twitter’s investors assumed the company was worth around $3 billion.