Conspiracy Theories

Lets go DEEP...

So facebook went public. Zuckerberg is now a gagillion, trillion, bajillion-aire. More power to him, I'm a capitalist. However, his company's IPO was valued in a somewhat "odd" way, and now there's been fall out - whispers really. The evaluation was based on the company's ability to increase its value by 47%, next year. A hefty target to say the least. And these sort of whispers are the kind adults had back in 1996 when owners of sites like "shoelaces.com" were becoming billionaires. Facebook was evaluated at a worth of between $100 billion to $116 billion. It settled around $102 billion. That's about $40 billion more than the value of Disney (bare in mind that name encompasses everything from classic movies, to theme parks, to ESPN to ABC, etc, etc). And I found it interesting that this evaluation of facebook was done by the same group (in fact the same guy) that did the GM evaluation for the government (JP Morgan).

Now 3 days later those "whispers" have gotten louder. And they go something on the order of, "what if facebook is overvalued?" You think? Look, I get that 900,000,000 people connect on facebook, I mean there's no better place to go to find out how the kid who sat two desks over from me in Algebra II is gearing up for the weekend, or see cellphone photos of how one of my jr. high girlfriends got wasted celebrating her 35th birthday at Senior Frogs. I mean this is vital, vital stuff people. But at least Disney had hard assets other than Zuckerberg's Ferrari collection.

Now those whispers are noting that, like Leihman Brothers, facebook's over all value to the American economy - both literal and psychological - means its' failure could serve as a Black Friday event for the stock market. It's now "too big to fail." You may scoff at the notion, but consider what we, Americans, build these days. We may not have assembly lines of tanks and TV's, but social networking, that's our bread and butter. THAT is what we innovate now - means of connection.

Side note - I have a gmail account (google email). I sent my sister, who's a third year law student come fall, an email from that account asking her thoughts on the various aspects of the charging document within the Zimmerman/Treyvon criminal case. Murder 2 to be exact. I thought (as does Alan Derschawitz) that second degree murder was a stretch. Google, of course, charges nothing for this account, however you must put up with a side bar (pardon the pun) of ads that run along your inbox. Google also recently had a vast update to their "disclosure" policy. One of those deals where you scroll to the bottom and check "accept" so you can hurry off to wherever you're going. Upon reading her return email, innocuously entitled "RE: sis", I noticed a trend to the ads now appearing on the right side. They were all advertisements for criminal law school and/or criminal law attorneys. Quite an effective ad mechanism, don't you think? Consider Sears-Roebuck of 1960 having access to the details of your private snail mail correspondence.

An additional side note - in the 1940's, and it was enhanced in the 1970's (1948 & 1972 respectively, if I recall correctly) the US congress passed (& it was signed into law) prohibitions on the government's domestic use of propaganda. More recently the US House (controlled by the GOP) joined forces with the Senate to repeal those prohibitions. Cass Sunstein (another Saul Alinsky acolyte & our current "Regulation Czar") must be thrilled, he has long advocated various domestic propaganda initiatives.

Now back to "too big to fail." We've seen the governments propensity (from both parties) to bail out any company deemed with such a status. What a handy tool it would be to control the "messaging" in a marketplace where 900,000,000 people come to connect. After all, if facebook is indeed overvalued, and the economy is facing crisis after "fb's"  failure to hit its' modest 47% value increase, what other choice will our president have than to bail them out? But that's crazy talk ... after all, its not like the President of the United States would order the bail out of a company, divvy up its shares, direct restrictions on its' advertising budget, fire its' CEO and then use his "saving" of the company as a political tool. No, not a chance. In a completely unrelated story, have you seen the new line of GM's? They're awesome.