Facebook Goes Public to Raise $5 Billion after the Celebration of Its 8th Birthday

After its 8th anniversary celebration which was held last Saturday, Facebook revealed it goes public with $5 billion IPO. It is expected to be Silicon Valley’s largest ever initial public offering, worth up to $100 billion when it goes public.

According to recent reports, the web investing boom could raise as much as $10 billion and value the social network between $75 billion and $100 billion. The IPO prospectus unveils interesting figures. Facebook says it has 845 million monthly active users, generated $3.71 billion in revenue and made $1 billion in net profit last year, up 65 percent from the $606 million it made in 2010.

First launched by Mark Zuckerberg for Harvard University undergrads, the site later opened up to other schools and gathered about 5 million members in just two years. Now, it has more than 800 million users worldwide and this is 40% of all Internet users. It’s expected to reach 1 billion members by August. It’s the number one most-visited site worldwide after Google.

Facebook raised interest among investors since its beginnings, but declined bids from various companies including Yahoo that offer a bid of $1.6 billion. It was very clever, because four years later, the company could be worth nearly 100 times that number.