Facebook will begin trading shares publicly on Friday morning as expected and CNBC.com reports that the price of its stock will be $38 a share. That"s on the high end of Facebook"s previous expectations for the stock price. A few days ago, the company indicated in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that the stock price would be between $34 to $38 per share.
The initial public offering (IPO) of shares is expected to raise as much as $16 billion for Facebook. The stock price will also value the company at about $104 billion when it starts trading on the NASDAQ stock market. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who owns the largest amount of stock of the company, will, on paper anyway, be worth around $17 billion when trading on Facebook begins.
Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives will ring the NASDAQ opening bell from Facebook"s headquarters in Menlo Park, California at 9:30 am ET on Friday. The actual trading of Facebook"s stock will start at 11 am ET.
Before that happens, Facebook employees will engage in one of the company"s periodic "hackathon" events. VentureBeat.com reports that the 31st Facebook hackathon will start at 10 pm ET tonight and go all the way until the company starts trading its stocks tomorrow. Hackathons allow Facebook employees to create code and software projects on the fly that could later be used in Facebook"s services.