OK… so today Microsoft finally beat out Google and Yahoo for FaceBook… investing $240 million for a teeny tiny 1.6% stake, valuing FaceBook at $15 billion. So, let’s see where that puts FaceBook… (and I’ll now use a link to Google Finance, which provides the chart I want nicely:
| Company | Symbol | Mkt Cap |
|---|---|---|
| Northwest Airlines Corporation | NWA | 3.55B |
| Nordstrom, Inc. | JWN | 9.29B |
| Southwest Airlines Co. | LUV | 10.34B |
| 15.00B | ||
| Ford Motor Company | F | 18.04B |
| General Motors Corporation | GM | 21.89B |
| Amazon.com, Inc. | AMZN | 36.76B |
| Yahoo! Inc. | YHOO | 41.10B |
| eBay Inc. | EBAY | 48.63B |
| Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. | WMT | 178.47B |
| Google Inc. | GOOG | 210.95B |
| AT&T Inc. | T | 252.29B |
| Microsoft Corporation | MSFT | 293.80B |
| Exxon Mobil Corporation | XOM | 510.98B |
Right… so FaceBook is right now somewhere between Southwest Airlines and Ford. And they’re not even public yet! Now, the reality is that MS just put in $240 million for a deal, and the valuation may be $15B, or it may be somewhat smaller when the company goes public (or is acquired). What this really says is that the Search Wars have really begun — Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are going to start tossing around big, and I mean big, dollars here to get a big share of the advertising market.
Wonder how long it’ll take for there to be a MSN Live Whatever Search box on the FaceBook home page…
At first I though you said that Microsoft spent 15B on a 1.6% stake in facebook.
The race is on!