• Gawker, Thursday, December 15, 2011 12:05 PM

It’s no surprise that Facebook is flush, but the sheer mass of its riches -- just revealed to Gawker -- is remarkable. “They're even more staggering than we expected,” Gawker’s Ryan Tate writes. “A gusher of profits has left the social network with a cash hoard to rival established companies like 3M, eBay and Yahoo.”

Currently with about $6.5 billion in assets ($3.5 billion of which is in cash) Facebook’s balance sheet is expected to balloon -- particularly if, as expected, it raises $10 billion at a $100 billion valuation in an initial public offering. “The big picture is this: Facebook's income is blowing up, and the company will likely come close to earning a full billion dollars in profit this year, more than double what it reportedly made a year ago and quadruple what it is believed to have made two years ago,” writes Tate.

But, honestly, what can Facebook do with all that cash? Buy, buy, buy, Tate suggests. “Facebook's billions in assets … constitute a war chest that can be used to buy other tech companies,” he writes. “The company's growing bank balance puts it in a position to initiate more, and more substantial acquisitions, should it decide to do so.”

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