Facebook Valuations Are All Over the Map

Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal reports: The true valuation of Facebook isn't likely to be known until it goes public or is acquired.

But its stock has been trading recently on the SecondMarket private trading exchange at prices that would peg the value at $9.5 billion.

That's a far cry from the $15 billion that the Palo Alto social networking company was valued at when Microsoft Corp. took a stake in it in 2007.

It's higher, however, than the $6.5 billion valuation placed on it in July when Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies offered to buy $100 million of Facebook employees' pre-IPO shares.

And it is far higher than the $3.7 billion the company had reportedly valued itself at in the summer of 2008 when it settled a lawsuit with the Harvard classmates of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook shares have risen 42 percent since July on New York-based SecondMarket, where an estimated $75 million in transactions have been completed in the stock. There have reportedly only been about a dozen trades in the stock on the exchange in the past two months.

Those trades are highly speculative, since little has been publicly disclosed about the company's finances to date.