Facebook IPO and What $10B Buys

The headlines have picked up once again for a possible Wednesday filing for Facebook's IPO. Expected in May, the IPO could raise around $10 Billion and place a stock market value on Facebook as high as $100 Billion.

With Facebook already being watched closely for their supposed 800+ million assets (users) and potential value per user, their IPO will be heavily scrutinized. It's hard to believe such a high value placed on a company like Facebook, and to me it just seemed like an opportunity to randomly calculate things that one could do with $10 Billion.

Since this is a data center blog and new facilities typically cost a dollar or two, how much would $10 Billion buy in data centers?  Well, going off of their own $450 million price tag for past Facebook data centers, they could build 22 more data centers around the world to support their (surely) agressive growth plans.  Alternatively they could just acquire Equinix ($5.74B market cap) and Level 3 ($4.04B market cap) and just use those existing facilities and networks to power their growth. $10 Billion would almost equal the total amount of Data Center mergers and acquisitions in 2011 ($12.3B).

Otherwise, here are some fun (and totally irrational) things $10B could buy:

1. Give $12.50 to all 800 million users
2. Send 50,000 people on a Virgin Galactic trip into space.
3. Buy Autonomy from HP
4. Acquisition possibilities:
1. RIM ($8.8B)
2. Zynga ($7.03B)
3. LinkedIn ($7.39B)
4. (most of) Dish Network ($12.33B)
5. Sprint ($6.5B)
6. Purchase 83,884 shares of Berkshire Hathaway
7. Twitter (~$8B)
5. Purchase 845 megawatts of power from the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in northern Oregon.
6. Supply the one year payroll for the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL
7. How many hours of 'Eight extra large cluster compute instances' on Amazon's EC2 could they buy?   Let's just say its enough to last the life of the company (and then some)
8. If you figure $1/Gigabyte of SSD storage - they could buy over 9.3 Exabytes of storage