Fretting Facebook's Future

Geez, I sign up, get addicted, only to learn one month later that my new addiction might disappear as quickly as it showed up? Of all the things I thought might evaporate as the result of global financial meltdown — my income, my 401K, employment in general – Facebook was not one of things I had considered.

According to this astute blogger at breakingviews.com, Facebook is teetering on the edge. Five key employees have recently walked out the door, including co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who is leaving to start a business-focused social network, a la LinkedIn. Another Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, 24, left the company in early 2007 to go work for Barack Obama and help him raise record amounts of cash by sending record amounts of spam (but I’m not hatin’, I’m just deletin’. I’m also not from Alaska so I can put g’s at the end of words when appropriate).

Mr. Abovementioned Blogger says Facebook’s problem is the combination of a drop in valuation combined with a lack of cash flow just when the company needs cash to encourage employees to stay. True, it is a bummer when you were once the hottest company in Silicon Valley, then failed to sell, then woke up to realize all the guys that would have paid way too much out of fear and ego to acquire you now have no money. That is sad. I am crying right now. Seriously. Tears are running down my face.

Breakingview’s blogger also frets about employees walking out the door unless Facebook lets them cash out at a set stock price, which could really drain the company’s cash reserves. Maybe employees will do that, but then where will they go? Who else will employ them? But it’s probably better to take a guaranteed buy-out and weather the storm than to continue working with dwindling hope of ever cashing out at all and then being laid off with nothing to show for it like the rest of us working stiffs. Either way, you end up without a job.

But more importantly, I end up without Facebook. What the heck is up with that?

Did I mention the market closing at under 9000 points today is newly freaking me out? Wasn’t the market supposed to sit tight today during the holiday?