Facebook made it into the "increase" category, but just barely.
— Pallavi Gogoi, AP Business Writer
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ZUCK: DOING THE MATH
The closing stock price of $38.23, multiplied by a holding of 503,601,850 shares, gives CEO Mark Zuckerberg a stake worth $19,252,698,725.
And 50 cents.
In Menlo Park., Calif., Zuckerberg addressed Facebook employees Friday morning and said: "Right now this all seems like a big deal. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But here's the thing, our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected," Zuckerberg said. "In the past eight years, all of you out there have built the largest community in the history of the world. You've done amazing things that we never would have dreamed of and I can't wait to see what you guys all do going forward."
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MAD MONEY
Earlier this week, Mad magazine imagined a Facebook stock certificate, complete with a photo of Mark Zuckerberg smiling from inside an oval, like George Washington on the dollar bill.
"Thank you for funding our ongoing effort to collect and control every single piece of personal information on the Internet," the certificate said. "Every photograph, every song, every social cause, every event listing, every opinion, every breathless description of a recently eaten pulled-pork sandwich."
Facebook is drifting back toward its offering price of $38. It's up just 10 cents for the day now as volume nears half a billion shares.
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THE RUSH FROM SMALL INVESTORS
TD Ameritrade, the online brokerage, reported that in the first 45 minutes that Facebook was trading, it accounted for a record 24 percent of trades executed by its customers.
By comparison, on its first day back on the stock market, in November 2010, General Motors represented 7 percent of overall trades on TD Ameritrade. For the LinkedIn IPO, in May 2011, the figure was 5 percent.
Steve Quirk, who oversees trading strategy at TD Ameritrade, said that about 60,000 orders were lined up before Facebook opened.
"The volume has been unbelievable even though the stock hasn't moved dramatically," Quirk said. "It's a hot topic in our chat rooms, and most people expected to see the stock move more than it has."
— Pallavi Gogoi, AP Business Writer
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BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS
Twitter users were joking about the Facebook IPO.
From Conan O'Brien: "Today, Facebook went public, just as MySpace's last user went private."
And from the Twitter feed of the website Someecards: "My favorite Facebook public offerings are still your beach photos."
— Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer
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CALIFORNIA DREAMING
Gov. Jerry Brown of California must not have seen "The Social Network."
In an appearance on "CBS This Morning," Brown said that his state is the land of innovation and that it was where Facebook was invented. He added: "Not in Texas, not in Arizona, not in Manhattan and certainly not, you know, under the White House or the Congress."
But interviewer Charlie Rose pointed out that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others developed the site at Harvard University, all the way across the country in Cambridge, Mass.
Brown responded that the Facebook inventors quickly came to California, "where all the other innovative people are."
— Juliet Williams, AP Sacramento bureau
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WE ARE THE ONE-QUARTER PERCENT
Conversations about the Facebook IPO accounted for 0.25 percent of all online discussion during the first part of the workday, until about 1 p.m., according to NM Incite, a company that tracks social media traffic.
That may sound small, but it's an increase of 5,000 percent compared with the buzz about the Facebook IPO a month ago. It is also four times greater than the chatter for the LinkedIn IPO and 10 times greater than the Groupon IPO.
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