The Facebook ‘Share’ Tax ....No Free Lunch

Everything has now been written…twice…about the Facebook ($FB) IPO.

It was awful, rigged, great, bad, evil etc….

It’s over though. Monday is a new day. Greece can’t ‘friend’ their way out of their mess and there is no good verb for Italy to describe it’s financial condition – so let’s just use ‘ciao’.

What people fail to realize is that sharing was never free. Friday we saw the new price/tax on sharing…$16 billion. We all paid it to just one company. Now the government of Facebook gets to allocate your tax dollars as they see fit.

I share a LOT. The Facebook tax is one that I should pay my share of.

Same goes for my California State Tax. I get clean streets, amazing public schools, great weather and pretty safe streets in Coronado, so I will pay my taxes and keep my mouth mostly shut.

Healthcare is another thing and while the world bitches about Facebook, the PBM companies (Pharmacy Benefit Management) have more ill gotten gains than a Columbian drug cartel. I hope we can fix this in this next technology cycle.

The Twitter Tax is going to be here soon and it will not be nearly as high, thanks to the Morgan Stanley pillaging of every last public nickel to get it’s fees up.

Facebook was pretty dead to me when they took Goldman money. They did not need it. They had the user base and the community to change the way money could be raised and allocated.

Once in Goldman hands, the race to the bootom as Josh Brown eloquently describes it, was on. I am with Josh in many ways that Friday was a new pathetic all-time low for the state of many things.

Kudo’s to Facebook for crowdsourcing all the money to be had, but shame on them for the immense slippage to get to the IPO. I would imagine $2-$3 billion in unproductive capital has been wasted on fees to date.

I remain a big optimist because that slippage will come out of the financial industry at some point soon. They have to.

Apple earned their way to $100 billion in cash. It took 40 years. They are starting to give it back.

Your move Facebook.