Facebook IPO for Cocktail Parties

  One of my hobbies is reading legal documents.
  Legislation is my favourite, but S1 filings also tickle my fancy.
  Since everyone is discussing Facebook's IPO filing documents, I decided to parse through them. So you don't have to.
  Perfect opportunity to create a little cheat sheet you can use to sound really knowledgable at cocktail parties when you 'expertly' explain why you won't be buying FB shares once they're on the market :-)
  Now, I'm not a lawyer, and I may be wrong, but here's what I'm seeing:
  1. An unspecified amount of their infrastructure, like servers and bandwidth are leased through outside financing and are 'off balance sheet'. Meaning they aren't really refelected in the numbers they report for cost of operating their business. This could be tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter.
  2. More than $1 billion of their reported cash 'revenue' in 2011 came from sale of shares in the company, not advertising or other business income. In fact only 56% of they $3billion+ in 2011 came from actual advertising, down from 62% in 2010
  3. The documents make a lot of reference to "RSU's", a form of stock options that apparently will have an unknown tax liability to the company. Reference is made to several billion dollars. The company states that this is a potential threat to their ongoing operations throughout the entire document.
  4. The company does not claim to have over 800 million users. Instead they speak of that number of Monthly Active Users (MAU's) which includes people who click on a like button once a month on any site anywhere on the internet.
  5. The company makes zero dollars from mobile use.
  Discuss :-)