Yesterday, Twitter priced its IPO at $26 per share, after initially setting a range of $17-$20 and then raising that to $23-$25. Today, Twitter is selling 70 million shares of common stock; at $26/share that works out to $1.82 billion. Yesterday, when the $26/share price was revealed, it valued the company at $14.16 billion based on 545 million non-diluted shares. Top Twitter executives and directors stand to make around $3.24 billion based on the $26/share price. After a year of several strong tech IPOs in areas like enterprise and ad-tech, Twitter is the most anticipated listing of a social media site.
The market right now is strong for social networks. LinkedIn, valued at $24.82 billion, is trading at over $220/share. Facebook, valued at over $121 billion, is trading at under $50/share. Those companies’ various partners, are likely to see a lift as a result of Twitter’s trajectory. Twitter itself has seen very strong growth. In the first nine months of 2013 to September 30, its revenues increased by 106% to $422.2 million over the year before.
