So Twitter avoided Facebook’s fate. At its flotation, the 80.5m shares it offered at $26 hit $50 at one point, before closing the first day’s trading at $44.90. The company is now valued at roughly $30bn, with at least two of its founders becoming billionaires overnight.
Contrast this with the launch of Mark Zuckerberg’s social network 18 months ago. Amid great fanfare, it sold 421m shares at $38 per share, and struggled to a closing price of $38.23 before dropping by $4.20 per share on the second day of trading,
But the $1.5bn in capital gains received by public market investors on the first day of trading – money “left on the table” – could have landed on Twitter’s balance sheet. The underwriters, who received $68m, did not serve their client well.