It is David Ebersman’s fault. There is just no way around
it. Mr. Ebersman is Facebook’s
well-liked, boyish-looking 41-year-old chief financial officer. He’s not as
well known as Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, or
Sheryl Sandberg, its chief operating officer and recently appointed director. But
when it came to Facebook’s catastrophe of an initial public offering — the
stock reached a new low on Friday, closing at $18.06 — it was Mr. Ebersman, not
Mr. Zuckerberg or Ms. Sandberg, who was ultimately the one pulling the strings.
A lot of ink has been spilled over Facebook’s I.P.O., with
investors and pundits mostly pointing the finger at the Wall Street banks, particularly
Morgan Stanley, which led the offering, and at Nasdaq, whose numerous computer
glitches on Facebook’s first day of trading undermined confidence in the stock.
They clearly deserve blame. David
Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer’s name, however, is mentioned only
occasionally, usually in passing and typically only among Silicon Valley’s
cognoscenti. And yet if there is one
single individual more responsible than any other for the staggering mispricing
of Facebook’s I.P.O., it is Mr. Ebersman.
He signed off on the ever-increasing
offer price, which ended up at $38 after the company had originally planned a
price range of $29 to $34. He — almost
alone — pushed to flood the market with 25 percent more shares than originally
planned in the final days before the offering. And since then, as the point
person for investors, he has done little to articulate how or why the company’s
strategy will lift the stock price any time soon…..
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