Monumental Frauds Part Two: Facebook
(Second of five articles on monumental frauds. The first dealt with what is probably the most fraudulent piece of legislation in American history, the Affordable Care Act, better known as the Obamacare abomination. [http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=26099] Parts Two though Five deal with lesser but no less fraudulent enterprises, Facebook, Google, the Washington Post, and the United Nations.)
FACEBOOK. I’m not the first to refer to Facebook.com as a fraud.
The authoritative Tech News World said it and substantiated the charge in May, based on the company’s deceptive revenue, profit, advertising, and user reports. Rob Enderle concluded his “Facebook Is a Fraud” piece by writing, “I think (Mark) Zuckerberg’s going to learn the Bernie Madoff lesson–that taking advantage of trust has a very high cost at the CEO level.”
However, that betrayal of trust goes far beyond manipulating numbers.
Originally planned by Zuckerberg and three fellow Harvard students as a website designed to identify college hotties for horny, Ivy League lechers, Facebook has been in business for some eight years. During that brief time it has been beset by various lawsuits, minor and major scandals, yet now claims almost a billion members worldwide.
Thanks to its recent Initial Public Offering, Facebook has made Zuckerberg a multi-billionaire and dozens of his faithful employees multi-millionaires, which is a good thing, a classic American success story.
A success story with noticeable warts.
In May 2012, 28 year old Zuckerberg finally decided to take his (allegedly) stolen enterprise public with an IPO offering price of $38. and valued Facebook at an historically high $104 billion. (Eberly suggests its actual value is closer to .0001 of that figure.)
Greedily dreaming of getting in on the ground floor of an anticipated twenty-first century version of Microsoft and Apple, tens of thousands of investors and speculators bit on the over-priced, over-valued Facebook at $42.
Most were bitten on their financial asses by the realities of how things really work in the cut-throat financial world.
Except for favored banks and Wall Street insiders which were able to buy in at the IPO asking price, average investors and speculators lost money big and small time depending on their level of trust when FB stock went nowhere and, two months after its initial offering, was selling on NASDAQ for $31.10 a share.
So much for hype and overvaluation, so much for trust.
Katherine Losse served five, early years at Facebook and told all in her book, “The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network.“
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=26135.)
(Second of five articles on monumental frauds. The first dealt with what is probably the most fraudulent piece of legislation in American history, the Affordable Care Act, better known as the Obamacare abomination. [http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=26099] Parts Two though Five deal with lesser but no less fraudulent enterprises, Facebook, Google, the Washington Post, and the United Nations.)
FACEBOOK. I’m not the first to refer to Facebook.com as a fraud.
The authoritative Tech News World said it and substantiated the charge in May, based on the company’s deceptive revenue, profit, advertising, and user reports. Rob Enderle concluded his “Facebook Is a Fraud” piece by writing, “I think (Mark) Zuckerberg’s going to learn the Bernie Madoff lesson–that taking advantage of trust has a very high cost at the CEO level.”
However, that betrayal of trust goes far beyond manipulating numbers.
Originally planned by Zuckerberg and three fellow Harvard students as a website designed to identify college hotties for horny, Ivy League lechers, Facebook has been in business for some eight years. During that brief time it has been beset by various lawsuits, minor and major scandals, yet now claims almost a billion members worldwide.
Thanks to its recent Initial Public Offering, Facebook has made Zuckerberg a multi-billionaire and dozens of his faithful employees multi-millionaires, which is a good thing, a classic American success story.
A success story with noticeable warts.
In May 2012, 28 year old Zuckerberg finally decided to take his (allegedly) stolen enterprise public with an IPO offering price of $38. and valued Facebook at an historically high $104 billion. (Eberly suggests its actual value is closer to .0001 of that figure.)
Greedily dreaming of getting in on the ground floor of an anticipated twenty-first century version of Microsoft and Apple, tens of thousands of investors and speculators bit on the over-priced, over-valued Facebook at $42.
Most were bitten on their financial asses by the realities of how things really work in the cut-throat financial world.
Except for favored banks and Wall Street insiders which were able to buy in at the IPO asking price, average investors and speculators lost money big and small time depending on their level of trust when FB stock went nowhere and, two months after its initial offering, was selling on NASDAQ for $31.10 a share.
So much for hype and overvaluation, so much for trust.
Katherine Losse served five, early years at Facebook and told all in her book, “The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network.“
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=26135.)
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