Thiel Sold 20 million Facebook Shares After Lock-up
Facebook director Peter Thiel sold roughly 20 million shares in the Internet social networking company last week, cashing out the majority of his stake, according to a regulatory filing.
Thiel sold his shares on Thursday and Friday, at prices ranging between $19.27 and $20.69 per share, as the first “lock-up” barring early investors and insiders from selling shares after the initial public offering was lifted.
Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard University dorm room, became the only U.S. company to debut with a market value of more than $100 billion. But investors have grown disillusioned with Facebook’s inability to articulate a plan to reverse slowing revenue growth.
Shares of Facebook finished Monday’s regular trading session at $20.01, down nearly 50 percent from their $38 offering price in May.
(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Elliott Dahan said on August 20, 2012
“What did he know and when did he know it ?” Senator Howard Baker(R-Tenn) during the Watergate Hearings regarding Richard Nixon.
And that has become the semi-rhetoric, hopefully self incriminating cornerstone question of inquiries into politicians and big business for the past 40 years.
Mike Isaac writing about ethics and blame in the Facebook IPO in his All Things D column wrote, “Facebook amended its S-1, the company cut its revenue forecast for 2012 and relayed that information verbally to analysts who worked for the underwriters, who then relayed that information to institutional investors. The retail investors, however, were cut out of the loop.”
Henry Blodgett commented on the meaning of this lack of disclosure saying, ““to those experienced in reading financial statements, this language was unnerving, because its mere existence could have been taken to mean that Facebook’s revenue in the second quarter wasn’t coming in as strong as Facebook had hoped (why else would the language have been added at the 11th hour).”
From Dan Gallagher of MarketWatch on May 16, 2012 – “Facebook then added about 83.8 million shares to its initial public offering. Several early investors in the social network increased the number of shares they plan to sell in the offering. Among these are Facebook directors James Breyer of Accel Partners and Peter Thiel.
Breyer boosted his planned sale by 28% to about 10.84 million shares, with some of those shares held by the VC firm he manages. Thiel more than doubled his planned share sale; he now plans to move about 16.8 million shares in the offering.
What is most unseemly and what is not mentioned is the personal enrichment of Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer, both members of the Board of Directors of Facebook and both men who dramatically increased the amount of shares they sold at the IPO between the initial filing and the
actual IPO.
If Thiel and Breyer knew nothing about the amended S-1 on May 9th which noted this “unnerving news”, then they would simply be incompetent.
But, if they knew about the amended S-1 and then doubled down on the IPO price of $38 per share then you would have to : (1) commend them for spinning all the blame on NASDAQ, Facebook and the Underwriters and (2) be really disgusted.
Why have neither the appropriate agencies nor the media dug deep on what Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer did behind closed doors ?