Facebook IPO
Facebook, in one of the world's most widely anticipated IPOs, or initial public offerings of stock, filed papers this afternoon to raise at least $5 billion and begin to sell stock this spring.
The filing was made online with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington. If all goes as planned, it will likely take until May for Facebook stock to begin trading on a stock exchange.
"There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, in a letter that accompanied the filing. "The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.
"We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other," he said.
Zuckerberg, now 27, famously started Facebook when he was a student at Harvard University in 2004. Today, it has more than 800 million active users, and Zuckerberg said they have made more than 100 billion connections with each other.
Facebook, along the way, has made a lot of money. It revealed in today's filing that in 2011 it had profits of $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion.
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