Normally a private company cannot have most than 500 stockholders. Facebook obviously has more than that number of employees. They previously applied for and got an exemption from the SEC on the basis that most stockholders were employees.
That all changed early last year with Goldman Sachs' "investment vehicle" of holding stock on behalf of clients (a move the SEC will see through). That was deliberately done in January as it put a clock on filing for IPO by April this year, which is what happened.
Now they may have wanted to go public anyway. Whether or not they wanted to they signaled this event over a year ago.
>Normally a private company cannot have more than 500 stockholders.
I'm sure that you probably know this but just to be clear, the 500 shareholder limit is about whether or not a company has to report certain financial data to the SEC, not whether or not they must be publically traded.
Normally a private company cannot have most than 500 stockholders. Facebook obviously has more than that number of employees. They previously applied for and got an exemption from the SEC on the basis that most stockholders were employees.
That all changed early last year with Goldman Sachs' "investment vehicle" of holding stock on behalf of clients (a move the SEC will see through). That was deliberately done in January as it put a clock on filing for IPO by April this year, which is what happened.
Now they may have wanted to go public anyway. Whether or not they wanted to they signaled this event over a year ago.