NEW YORK — In one of the largest initial public offerings of stock ever, Facebook said Thursday that it is raising at least $16 billion for itself and its early investors in a transaction that values the world’s definitive online social network at $104 billion.
Facebook’s IPO one
of the world’s largest
NEW YORK — In one of the largest initial public offerings of stock ever, Facebook said Thursday that it is raising at least $16 billion for itself and its early investors in a transaction that values the world’s definitive online social network at $104 billion.
It’s a big windfall for a company that began eight years ago with no way to make money.
Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share on Thursday, at the top of expectations. The company is selling just a portion of its shares as part of the offering. The $38 price means all of its shares will be worth about $104 billion, giving the company a market value higher than Amazon.com and other well-known companies such as Kraft, Disney and McDonald’s.
Facebook’s stock is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market sometime Friday morning under the ticker symbol “FB.” That’s when so-called retail investors can try to buy the stock.
Facebook’s offering is the culmination of a year’s worth of Internet IPOs that began last May with LinkedIn Corp. Since then, a steady stream of startups focused on the social side of the Web has gone public, with varying degrees of success. It all led up to Facebook, the company that’s come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.
U.S. ready to strike Iran if diplomacy fails
JERUSALEM — The U.S. has plans in place to attack Iran if necessary to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Washington’s envoy to Israel said, days ahead of a crucial round of nuclear talks with Tehran.
Dan Shapiro’s message resonated Thursday far beyond the closed forum in which it was made: Iran should not test Washington’s resolve to act on its promise to strike if diplomacy and sanctions fail to pressure Tehran to abandon its disputed nuclear program.
Shapiro told the Israel Bar Association the U.S. hopes it will not have to resort to military force.
“But that doesn’t mean that option is not fully available. Not just available, but it’s ready,” he said. “The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready.”
Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, like energy production. The U.S. and Israel suspect Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, but differences have emerged in how to persuade Tehran to curb its program.
Commercially built rocket will fly to
the space station;
‘new way of doing business for NASA’
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — For the first time, a private company will launch a rocket to the International Space Station, sending it on a grocery run this weekend that could be the shape of things to come for America’s space program.
If this unmanned flight and others like it succeed, commercial spacecraft could be ferrying astronauts to the orbiting outpost within five years.
It’s a transition that has been in the works since the middle of the last decade, when President George W. Bush decided to retire the space shuttle and devote more of NASA’s energies to venturing deeper into space.
Saturday’s flight by Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is “a thoroughly exciting moment in the history of spaceflight, but is just the beginning of a new way of doing business for NASA,” said President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser, John Holdren.
By handing off space station launches to private business, “NASA is freeing itself up to focus on exploring beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years.”
By wire sources