Are the mighty falling?

In a world where ego is everything in business, I like to be the little guy. I have always said that no matter how famous or rich I become, I always want to look at $50 as a lot of money. I have stayed true to that and I am almost 30 years old.

Naturally when Facebook’s stock went public last week and the company was valued at over $100 billion, there was a part of me that secretly hoped the company wouldn’t do well.

The company’s valuation seemed ambitious and cocky and once the opening bell rang on Friday, then on Monday, then again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday (you get the picture) the fact that the stock was hovering in the mid-$30 range was laughable to many. Here is a company that has such an inflated ego of itself getting a reality check when investors and bankers say the value of Facebook was way off.

Over the years Facebook has been a behemoth: not listening to its users, making drastic changes that frustrated millions of people, all the while insisting the customer was still front and centre in the company’s outlook. And despite people’s addictions to Facebook, they still have a hatred for the website and are hesitant to shut down their self-glorifying page.

The great thing about stocks is that they aren’t targeted to the regular Facebook user. That means the non-love is coming from all sides. It’s coming from the actual users and the behind-the-scenes money people. I scroll through news stories and a headline says, “Lawsuits pile up over Facebook IPO” and I laugh.

I am writing this column Wednesday afternoon, so who knows what the Facebook stock is at when you read this. As I watch the scrolling ticker right now the price is hovering at $31.57 (and it opened at $31.41 today).

Here I am, glued to the stock market when I don’t understand it and have never cared for a minute what it was all about. But like many people fascinated with current events, I am very interested to see what happens with Facebook, if not for my own pleasure to see how the mighty are falling.

At the end of the day, I still have my $50 and Mark Zuckerberg has his billions and we go on our way.