Facebook, Billion | featured news

Facebook's stock market debut left founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a paper fortune currently valued at $13 billion -- and a 2012 tax bill of around $1.1 billion.vZuckerberg's whopping tax hit stems from his move last May to increase his stake in Facebook. On the day of Facebook's initial public offering, Zuckerberg exercised a stock option and purchased 60 million Facebook shares at a "strike price" of 6 cents each.

More than a billion people now log into Facebook each month to check up on old friends, tag photos of new ones and post about politics, religion, cats or what their kids are doing. That's double the 500 million it hit in July 2010 - what now seems like a lifetime but was a little more than two years ago. August 2008 marked another milestone, 100 million. The latest milestone also amounts to nearly half of the world's roughly 2.5 billion Internet users, as measured by the International Telecommunications Union.

Kevin Systrom's smartest move was to sell Instagram to Facebook early, before having to deliver even an iota of revenue. My prediction is that we’ll look back on Facebook's acquisition of Instagram as a bust—much in the same way we now view News Corp.’s purchase of Myspace, AOL’s purchase of Bebo, and Excite@Home’s purchase of Blue Mountain Arts.

Facebook will hit the 1 billion user mark in August, according to an analyst... You know what’s cool? A billion. Users, that is. Having passed the $1 billion revenue mark some time ago, Facebook is now closing in on 1 billion users. The company claimed 800 million users in September, so it’s not surprising that claiming membership of one-seventh of humanity is now within the social network’s grasp.

The most anticipated stock market debut of 2012 is expected to value Facebook at as much as $100 billion and mint at least a thousand new millionaires.

Mark Zuckerberg is eyeing the takeover of the much popular Skype, in a deal that might cost Facebook close to $4 billion.