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Facebook: Yours For $10 Billion

  • The Deal, Tuesday, July 24, 2007 11:01 AM
Here's a piece of big news that just about everyone missed: Facebook is on the block, and they want just $10 billion. Any takers? Google, Microsoft (it's too expensive now for Yahoo)? The hint came from a report in The Deal last week where PayPal co-founder and Facebook director/major investor ($500K) Peter Thiel discussed the possibility of a merger.

Thiel basically said that neither an acquisition or an IPO were in the immediate cards: "If we have a fully developed revenue model, it would be much easier to value [Facebook ... but we're very, very far from that point." However, at the end of the report he threw out the following: "If we got an offer from someone for $10 billion, we probably would listen to them. I don't think we're going to get that offer, and we're not going to solicit it."

Internet Outsider Henry Blodgett says Thiel's comments are nothing if not a "come hither" to Google and Microsoft. "Any time a company is this specific about what it would take to get it to the table, it's for sale," he says, adding that given Thiel's specific breakdown of the company's finances, Facebook is probably for sale "at the low end" of the stated $7 billion to $10 billion range. Either that or Facebook is soliciting investment bankers for a possible IPO, but as Blodgett says, it's probably the former considering that the social network, according to Thiel, is on pace to make just $150 million in revenue this year (of which half goes to Microsoft for its ad deal.

Read the whole story at The Deal »

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