its worth what someone would pay for it. i cant see why someone would buy facebook for this amount of money - how would you expect to get your money back in lets say 10 years?! ppc advertising? i would buy 10 amazon.com or ebay's instead - unlike facebook they have a working business model and probably make x-times more profit than facebook in the same time.
With microsoft willing to pay a staggering 500 million for just 5% of the site that indicates that people are willing to pay A LOT for it and given the rate it is growing that figure will only increase. You pay a premium for huge growth & potential, first and forement. Would you pay more than $1 for $1 bill? Probably not. But what if you had a 90% chance of making an additional $10? Then it would be a good deal to pay extra. Just a year ago facebook was worth a billion and three years. And three years ago no one in their wildest dreams could have imagined it being worth 10 billion. But now it is. The potential is unlimited.
If they could make $175 off of every man, woman, and child on this planet they'd have $1 trillion. I'd say they're a long way off.
Most of you guys are missing the point, read back to this post: it doesn't matter how much it is technically worth, it's about what someone is willing to pay for that. Keep in mind, all it is is text when it boils down to it...
Exactly. Valuations aren't cut and dry. The keep is looking forward two to five years or even more and not the present.
Will Facebook be $1 trillion? Microsoft just offered to buy Yahoo for $40-50 billion. Did you hear it? For now, Google is $160 billion (please visit to http://finance.google.com then type GOOGLE). P.S: Facebook is not a public company.
IMO there is no way that Facebook will ever be worth 1 Trillion dollars, and find it far-fetched even as to how Microsoft hopes to recoup their 500 million dollar investment. While some speculation for growth potential is possible, all of the previous Internet giants have shown huge growth potential, put up huge numbers and then tanked. Just like Facebook killed MySpace; another company will rise up and crush Facebook.
Exactly. In 10 years time, I'm sure there will be 1 or 2 companies that will squash Facebook and drop it like all the other social networking sites before it.