The fiasco of Mark Zuckerberg, the promise to his wife and the Acropolis

Facebook goes public, selling shares at $38 and raising $16 billion. This is the most anticipated initial public offering of all time and the third largest IPO in US history after Visa and General Motors.

When Facebook (now renamed Meta Platforms) crossed the threshold IPOits market capitalization was $104 billion, and the number of registered users worldwide reached 900 million people.

And of course, Mark Zuckerberg did it all outside the box, as you would expect from a former hacker. Instead of driving to New York and ringing the Nasdaq bell, as is customary on the first day of trading for a new listing, he did so remotely from the backyard of Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Dressed in the hoodie that was his trademark at the time, he appeared on television with a crowd of enthusiastic company employees.

“I want to say a few words and then we’ll ring the bell and get back to work, he said when everyone fell silent listening to him. – Now everything looks great. Going public is an important milestone in our history. But there is one thing: our mission is not to be a publicly traded company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected”.

Finally, the moment everyone has been waiting for has arrived. “Well, let’s do it!”. The bell rang for the start of the meeting, and Zuckerberg signed on the digital screen in front of him: “For a more open and connected world.” In a fraction of a second, this handwritten message appeared on huge screens in Times Square, above the Nasdaq ticker.

But things didn’t go the way Zuckerberg and everyone else betting on Facebook stock expected.

The hype, which is usually observed in the most sought-after stocks on the first day of trading, did not occur. In fact, the IPO turned into a fiasco, as the stock immediately fell, hitting a low of $17.55 in the following months. It took more than a year for the stock to return to the $38 level and for those involved in the IPO to get their money back.

In fact, this IPO failure overshadowed the early days of the wedding of the 28-year-old billionaire founder of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg secretly arranged to marry his sweetheart, Priscilla Chan, on May 19th. The couple wanted to have a modest wedding, so they decided to keep the event a secret and hold it in their backyard. Zuckerberg sent out emails to friends and family saying he planned to throw a surprise party for Priscilla to celebrate her graduation from medical school.

However, he never imagined that his wedding would take place so close to the day of the IPO. “One of the side effects of the surprise wedding was that the Facebook CFO who ran the IPO process didn’t know we were getting married. The IPO process takes a long time and you go public when it’s ready. When I set the date for our surprise , we had no idea when the IPO would happen,” he would say a few years later.

When he learned that the IPO would take place the day before the wedding, he tried to find a solution. “I was shocked. I closed the door and asked if it could be done a few days earlier. She told me that it would not be ready. I asked if we could do it a week later and he said that on May 18 – this is the day when everything will be ready and it should be done on the same day.And here is the IPO was done the day before our wedding“.

And if the wedding went smoothly, then with the IPO, things were different. The newlyweds were forced to return early from their honeymoon due to a fall in the Facebook stock price. “I wanted to be there for our team when things got tough, so I took a few days off from my honeymoon. Instead, I promised Priscilla that every year we would go on a honeymoon to celebrate our wedding.”“Zuckerberg recalls.

This promise brought the couple to Athens in May 2019. When Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook account on May 17 a photo of him and Priscilla smiling in front of Parthenon, the Athenian press services were alarmed. Many journalists climbed the rock of the Acropolis to find traces of one of the richest people in the world. But he was nowhere to be found, as it was later revealed that the photo had been taken a few days earlier. This was preceded by the “escape” of the couple on a yacht to the Cyclades.

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