"............Debacle" LOL You say "Debacle" as if it's 100x worse than what you are doing. LOL give him a call and compare bank accounts
You are not looking at the entire picture. When most companies go public their goal is not to maximize the share price and screw over anyone left buying their new stock on the open market, but rather somewhere in the middle. Early investors need to get a good price to cash out at, but you still need to keep the IPO low enough so its attractive to the public and it can get a decent pop on the open. A public company should want to have good relations with their investors and as well as a popular stock to own in the eyes of the market. As of now, most investors hate Facebook and would never touch the stock because of how their IPO went, and Facebook will have an extremely difficult time if they ever want to try and raise money in the future. The notion of it being a good thing that Facebook screwed over the common investor is idiotic. You can't look at an IPO like it's a basic stock trade and say buy low sell hi, unless the company's plan from the beginning was to just pump and dump and that they think the company is a sinking ship. I am not defending facebook, in fact I can't stand the company, but the only reason investors are calling for Zuckerberg to step down is because they are down 50% in the stock and not because he is a bad CEO (jury is still out on that one).
Yes, that's the old investment banker club view. Then they - the old line IBs - get to skim off of "the middle". FB outplayed 'em. Well done.
Zynga was a scam from the beginning. They couldn't get that IPO out fast enough, as behind the curtain the business was completely collapsing. If they could have gotten a higher price, they absolutely would have, as the company was built by ex-EA management specifically as an "IPO and get the hell out" play.
Getting $10 for a scam is still pretty good. The point with ZNGA was that after its dip, it still went up 40% compared to the IPO, and even more counting from the low of the dip... So very early investors could make 20-30$ before the decline started.... With FB, the rally only lasted a few hours....
Sure, I agree that those are the options, but as I already explained, different groups have different interests. So you will always find a group preferring one of those options.
They shouldn't have been able to make anything on that stock. That they did is merely an indication of how well the fleecers did their jobs.