And to be honest, Facebook would be a really lousy investment at the current valuation (whatever that number happens to be depending on the phase of the moon $14-$100 billion). Even at the conservative end of this ridiculous metric, say $25 billion, it would take about 30 years at current revenue to equal that let alone make any money on it -- that's a shitty investment as bad as buying a house. They'd have to double their revenue stream every single year to make it worth buying at that price within some reasonable payoff-time like 5 years (a saner metric that most people use when valuing corporate assets, "what's the 5 year revenue expectations of this company?). Sure they're on an exponential growth path right now, how much longer do exponential growth paths last? History shows, "not long".
Their bigger problem is that they pretty much have most of the Internet connected human species with broadband and disposable income already signed up. I don't think any of the analysts understand this. You'd have to drag huge chunks of the population of the planet out of poverty and into middleclassdom to make any meaningful movement upwards in those numbers. FB might be able to squeeze 750 million users this generation out of the planet. But getting more than that will involve bringing world peace to the Earth and feeding and educating all of humanity.
Looking at hard numbers, in markets where FB has about %50 market penetration, their growth rate is ~4% per month. Actually, the ~4% metric works even down to 30% penetration. And you see <10% growth for places with around a 15% penetration. The only places with high growth are current low penetration markets like India and Brazil, with ~14% growth, but <4% penetration. One could reasonably expect that as penetration increases, growth will decrease (yeah yeah every point growth in India is some huge number, but India is not some huge middle-class affluent market waiting for penetration, You're simply not going to sign on 30% of India's population only 7% have any Internet access at all, exactly the same as last year).
Doubling revenue year over year for 5 years is fantasy-land in most cases, not going to happen if you've saturated the market. And unless we make interstellar contact soon, or can expand Facebook into the Dolphin and Chimp populations, it's not going to grow much more. At some point, FB's new signons are going to start tracking global birthrates (and active users will start to decline as the baby boomers start to pass on). The human population growth curves of the planet look bleak for FB.
Don't get me wrong, FB is a valuable company, maybe $5-7 billion, maybe 10 on the very high end. Those are still very impressive numbers. But these valuation numbers that float around are some of the most fantastic multiples of revenue I've seen in ages. Either the models the analysts are using are wrong, or they're simply pulling random numbers out of their asses. I'm guessing the later since I've seen some pretty wild ranges.
So my real question is, Zuckerberg is richer than Jobs, based on what? How many wishes and unicorns Zuck can buy with his fantasy valuation money?
Valuation means nothing until it's turned into real money.