Topic: Mary Schapiro

Facebook IPO: Six key dates in its debacle

Facebook's first week as a publicly traded company will go down as a terribly botched corporate launch, perhaps one of the worst in recent history for such a highly visible entity. Eight days ago, it was the tech world's most highly anticipated initial public offering in eight years. Now, the social media company faces mounting legal woes and serves as an embarrassing example of how not to run an IPO. Despite rising insider pessimism about its growth prospects, Facebook kept boosting its asking price and the number of shares it would sell. The result: billions of dollars in losses; investigations by two congressional committees, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), an industry watchdog, and the state of Massachusetts; at least 13 class-action lawsuits; and thousands of resentful shareholders who days later still were unsure how many Facebook shares they had or at what price. Here are six key dates in Facebook's unfolding IPO disaster.