I'm with you on the major props to the team (of which MZ is a big part). Execution is king, and Facebook's execution of their strategy thus far has been exquisite. What that should translate to in dollar terms I don't know but, for me, it feels like it should be quite a bit less than a hundred billion.
Well, company valuation and stock exchange pricing have no relationship to effort at all. $100B is nothing to do with rewarding effort.
The stock exchange is a game where people bet on what the price will be in the future. Everything is based on perceived value, and there's no requirement to have any relationship to objective reality. I would wager that many of the people betting today do not themselves perceive that Facebook is "worth" $100B, but believe that there are others who perceive it is worth more.
True but it's also true that if MZ or any other shareholders choose to sell some of their equity, they will convert that paper money in to real money. Assuming the current share price holds long enough, that's a lot of real money.
But I take your point that there isn't really a strong connection between stock price and effort expended (although maybe there's more of an implied connection at the initial IPO price versus the share price a few months after trading). If I think about it a bit more, MZ and team are effectively bystanders in all this. It's not as if they got to decide the IPO price (if I've understood the process correctly i.e. the banks recommend the starting price?). Unfortunately, that's where my knowledge of high finance stops. Sometimes, I wish I'd taken a finance degree just to be equipped to understand the real game that's going on.
