Facebook sets price at $38 a share for IPO

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images file

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is selling about $1 billion worth of shares and will be left with a stake valued at $19 billion.

By Roland Jones

Updated at 4:30 p.m. ET: Facebook went public Thursday at $38 a share, raising $16 billion in a landmark initial public offering that values the company at more than $100 billion.

Investment banks organizing the?stock offering set the price at the top end of the range of $34 to $38 per share estimated by Facebook in a regulatory filing earlier this week. Shares of Facebook are expected to begin trading publicly on the Nasdaq stock market Friday at 11 a.m. ET under the symbol "FB."

At $38 a share, the offering values the eight-year-old company at $104 billion, making its IPO the largest-ever stock market debut for an Internet company. It will raise more than?$16 billion for Facebook and selling shareholders, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and ultimately could raise up to?$18.4 billion, assuming underwriters exercise their option for "overallotments" to meet strong demand.

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The IPO will leave Zuckerberg in control of the company, with more than 50 percent of the voting shares, and make him fabulously wealthy in the process, with a stake valued at some $19 billion.

Other?early investors in Facebook also will make a killing.

For example, Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook?s board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company back in 2004. He?s selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he'll get some $640 million.

Related: Who?s gonna get rich on the Facebook IPO?

The sky-high valuation of Facebook puts it a bit ahead of Web veteran Amazon.com, which has more than 10 times Facebook's $3.7 billion in revenue. But Facebook is growing quickly and posted $1 billion in profits last year, more than Amazon's $631 million.

For individual investors, who will get their chance when Facebook begins trading Friday, investing in the company could be a risky bet, said Jay Ritter, an IPO expert and Cordell Professor of Finance at the?University of Florida.

?My concern with Facebook is that at the valuation that public market investors are going to be buying in at there?s very little upside potential left,? he told CNBC.

But, he added, it doesn?t necessarily follow that Facebook is overvalued.

?The bullish case for Facebook is, as Google has demonstrated, targeted search can be an extremely profitable business, and Facebook has that franchise with social networks and it?s a very defensible business model,? Ritter said.

Related: Want a piece of Facebook? Here's what you need to know

In a regulatory filing issued Wednesday, Facebook said it expects to sell as many as 421.2 million shares,?up from a previous maximum of 337.4 million. The company is selling 180 million shares, raising an estimated $6.8 billion for general business use. The rest of the shares are being sold by early investors and company insiders who are cashing out.

An additional 63.2 million shares?could be sold to cover the overallotments.?

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

CNBC's Kayla Tausche shares final thoughts on Facebook ahead of its IPO.

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