Facebook could be worth $40B by next year

Zuckerberg stirs the rumor pot with 2010 revenue projections. Analysts weigh in on IPO prospects.

If Facebook is trying to distract the public from recent privacy snafus, it's doing a good job. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the WSJ he expects to attract between $1.2 and $2 billion in revenue this year, and will IPO at some point.

“We’re going to go public eventually, because that’s the contract that we have with our investors and our employees,” Zuckerberg told the WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro. But he added, “We are definitely in no rush.”

Zuckerberg talking IPO is a sure-fire attention-getter (and effective diversion). The 25-year-old founder has been notoriously blasé about IPO plans until now.

Vascellaro’s sources say that investors buying and seeking to buy Facebook shares expect the company to go public in 2011 with a market capitalization of $35 billion to $40 billion. Lou Kerner, a former Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, calls even those estimates conservative. He thinks the company will be worth $59 billion next year, and $100 billion by 2015.

Shares of the company exchanged on the private-company trading platforms like SecondMarket and SharesPost.have reached as high as $30 a share. That’s roughly the price Microsoft was willing to by Yahoo for in 2008, before its stock plummeted.

In the WSJ article, Zuckerberg also revealed that he used to end meetings by thrusting his fist in the air and leading employees in a chant of “domination!” but stopped after employees told him it was weird. Kind of creepy--one wonders why Mark would cough that one up.

It’s almost enough to get peoples’ minds off of those pesky misdirected messages.

image credit: mauricesvay