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(Image source: Flickr / shawncampbell)
BY MATT PICHT
Hashtags and retweets are coming to Wall Street as Twitter prepares to go public.
The paperwork for Twitter's initial public offering was unsealed Thursday. The social
media giant will be trading publicly under the symbol TWTR, and it expects to raise $1
billion through their IPO.
Twitter announced its public unveiling in classic brevity with a short tweet on its
official account.
But the filing itself is a bit more than 140 characters. At 240 pages, Twitter's public
filing reveals a wealth of new information about the company's inner workings.
Some of the highlights: in June Twitter reached about 218 million active users, it made about
$316 million in revenue last year, and CEO Richard Costolo made $11.5 million last year
as well. (Via Securities and Exchange Commission)
But for all the good news, Twitter's still in the red. The company's costs boomed along
with profits, and it lost almost $80 million last year. The Wall Street Journal says, "Twitter's
financials paint a familiar picture for tech startups: revenue has soared, but profits
don't exist."
And investors have been wary of tech stocks ever since Facebook's high-profile flop in
2012. Four months after their IPO, Facebook's shares dropped in value by half. (Via CBS)
But Facebook eventually recovered from its price dive, and a CNBC anchor thinks Twitter
is going to be a different story entirely.
"The risk of it being a Facebook flop on the IPO is much less than it was with Facebook.
Twitter is a company that's set up for Wall Street. They're telling you what they're going
to do, they're telling you how they're going to improve their bottom line."
Twitter shares are tentatively scheduled for public trading around Thanksgiving, though
the government shutdown could push the launch back until 2014.