Facebook will IPO as Early as April 2012

Facebook will make its long-anticipated move to go public between April and June 2012, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Monday. The report, which cites “people familiar with the matter,” says that Facebook is considering raising $10 billion in an IPO that could value it at more than $100 billion. This is consistent with a report in June that used the same eye-popping number of zeros to describe Facebook’s expected valuation. If realized, the valuation would make Facebook’s IPO one of the largest in history — more than four times as big as Google’s $23 billion IPO in 2004, and likely one of the 10 largest IPOs of all time. While the first rumors of Facebook’s impending IPO predicted that the company would go public during the first quarter of 2012, recent reports had suggested that the offering had been pushed back to “September or later.” The Wall Street Journal‘s sources cautioned that Facebook has not made any final decisions in its internal discussions about the timing of its filing — and that market conditions will ultimately determine how much money the company seeks and the value of the company.