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Facebook IPO: Six key dates in its debacle

6. Losses all around - May 25, 2012

Paul Sakuma/AP/File
This February file photo shows a worker working inside of Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. It's not just small investors who have lost hundreds of millions of dollars after a week of Facebook trading, it's employees, too. By one estimate, the average Facebook employee has paper losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A week after its IPO, Facebook closes at $31.91 a share, a 16 percent decline from its original price. About 25 percent of Facebook stock first sold to individual investors, a larger-than-normal share reflecting perhaps institutional investors' wariness of the company's growth prospects. If all the retail investors who reportedly bought its stock at its $38 opening price held onto their shares, they would have lost a collective $640 million, according to estimates.

They're not the only losers. The average Facebook employee has lost on paper more than $850,000 on the stock they were issued, according to one estimate.

The bigger the loss, the more law firms representing Facebook investors can sue for. As of Friday, at least 13 class action suits have been filed.

One irony of the IPO mess is that Facebook, the premier social media company, has not used its network much to get its message out. Facebook users aren't using the network much either to discuss the company's woes. The term "Facebook IPO" shows up more often on Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and Identica than it does on Facebook, according to Sprout Social,  a Chicago-based social-media analytics and contact-management firm.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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