Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is in no rush to take the popular social-networking site public, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Yet Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, now 25, seems intent on deferring that multibillion dollar payday.
He’s huddled with executives like Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Oracle Corp. President Charles Phillips—the goal being to extract wisdom about how to better run his independent company. He set up a dual-class voting structure that would make him less beholden to any public shareholders. And last year, when staffers began itching for richer rewards, he devised a way for them to cash in some of their Facebook stock—without pushing the IPO button.
“We’re going to go public eventually, because that’s the contract that we have with our investors and our employees,” Mr. Zuckerberg said during a recent interview. But, he added, “we are definitely in no rush.”
Despite hopes in the investment community that Facebook could herald a revival in the Silicon Valley IPO market, Mr. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he won’t be dictated to.
Zuckerberg told Reuters in May last year that an IPO was a few years out. In November, Facebook announced a dual-class stock structure to ensure voting control by existing owners, but reiterated it had no plans yet to go public.
Facebook, which lets users connect and share information with friends online, has emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular destinations, challenging established powerhouses like Yahoo Inc and Google Inc.
Facebook counts around 400 million users and has had large investments from the Microsoft Corp and from Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies.
