Source Reveals Facebook Is Gushing Cash
A well-placed mole has forwarded us the Silicon Valley equivalent of hard-core pornography: an explicit look at Facebook's finances. They're even more staggering than we expected. A gusher of profits has left the social network with a cash hoard …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gawker's leak lands at the end of a year when Facebook's private-market numbers had been pieced together from estimates rather than filings: Inside Facebook tracked revenue climbing from an estimated $700 million in 2009 toward a projected $1.1 billion in 2010, building on the advertising experiments that first monetized the platform back in 2009. A purported internal look at actual profits and cash converts those outside estimates into claimed ground truth — unconfirmed by the company, but attributed to a well-placed source.
The timing matters. Rumors reported two days earlier have Facebook planning its first mobile-advertising push by March, explicitly framed as adding revenue ahead of a possible initial public offering, and the same week's coverage has Timeline rolling out worldwide across web and Android. The leak also lands on a company whose employee base has held stock options since at least 2007 and whose alumni network — the so-called Facebook Mafia mapped by TechCrunch in February — gives the financials a wide circle of interested readers.
First-order effects
- Facebook's own numbers now circulate without its control: if the leaked figures hold up, they reset expectations for the valuation at a possible IPO and hand every secondary-market buyer and future underwriter a claimed baseline that the company neither confirmed nor denied.
- Current and former employees holding those long-standing options can price their stakes against claimed profitability rather than revenue multiples, sharpening retention tension ahead of any filing that would let insiders sell.
Second-order effects
- The rumored mobile-ad push by March reads differently against claimed gushing profits: it becomes less about survival revenue and more about fattening the pre-IPO growth story, pressuring Google and app-platform rivals who compete for the same mobile ad dollars.
- Rivals already consolidating under what the corpus describes as Facebook's overwhelming dominance now face a competitor that appears self-funding at scale, narrowing the argument for taking venture money to challenge it.
Third-order effects
- A profitable private company this size leaking its own financials illustrates why the pre-IPO information vacuum has become untenable: once claimed internals are public property, the pressure to file formal disclosures and end the secondary-market guesswork intensifies.
- If the pattern holds, late-stage private giants will keep operating as de facto public companies — monetizing new surfaces like mobile ahead of listing — while regulators and investors push for disclosure rules built for companies that stay private far longer than the old IPO window assumed.
The trend: Late-stage private internet companies are having their financials dragged into public view by leaks and secondary markets, converting the IPO from a funding necessity into a disclosure event they can time.