Facebooked

Kevin Drum puts the Facebook IPO into perspective: "The right way to think about IPOs doesn't really have much to do with the fundamentals of the company itself. Who cares if Facebook is going to be either (a) a flop or (b) the biggest company in the galaxy five years from now? All you really care about is Facebook's stock price the day after the IPO. Or, at most, a few months after the IPO. What you care about is whether other people are enthusiastic about Facebook. That's it. It's purely an exercise in forecasting the madness of crowds." By the way, as of 4pm eastern standard time, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (age 28) is worth $20 billion. That's just over $714 million for each year Zuckerberg has been alive.