The post-IPO share price decline is bad but I have not seen much, if any, evidence that it has hindered the ability to hire and retain employees.

Please note that those three points were my projections for how history will look back on the company. I'm not claiming there is some mountain of robust scientific evidence to support my position right now.

Having said that, anecdotes predict the real data surprisingly often, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of Facebook people who aren't impressed at half of the money they thought they had to fund their big house purchases disappearing before they could do anything about it. And of course, it's still relatively soon after the IPO, and a lot of the funds are only starting to become available around now. You wouldn't expect a mass exodus when a lot of money was still locked up.

As for recruiting new people, again I don't suppose Facebook are about to disclose hard data that makes them look bad, but where has the buzz gone? Pre-IPO, everyone and his brother seemed to want in, presumably in part because of the potential for a huge pay-off that everyone expected Real Soon Now. Without that incentive, and with plenty of other new businesses competing in the market that don't have Facebook's baggage, I find it hard to believe that they are still attracting the same quantity and quality of applicants as they did say 2-3 years ago.

Mark is one of the premier CEOs of his generation. He is, by far, the single most responsible for having created a $60 billion company, something few can ever even hope to do.

Is he, really? Or was he just in the right place at the right time, and if it hadn't been him and Facebook, it would have been someone else and their start-up instead?

As for being a $60B company, I think you're a little out-of-date. They're down to just over $40B already. In any case, I'm more inclined to judge big tech companies by how much money they actually make and not some random number the markets generate and label "market cap". And as of the first earnings call since going public, Facebook were actually making a loss.

Obviously that wasn't a typical earnings period because of the various stock-related factors, but they're taking roughly $1B per quarter in revenues, and making around $300M per quarter of profit after adjusting for the one-offs[1]. At that rate, to justify their current $40B valuation, they would need to sustain that level of profitability for over 30 years, or increase profitability through growth.

But where will this growth come from? By Zuckerberg's own admission, the market is increasingly moving to mobile for their social networking; that limits the opportunities to show as many ads. Their growth in user numbers has slowed to a crawl, because there are only so many people in the world to sign up and some of the ones who did sign up are going to get bored and do something else. And the return on investment for on-line advertising is falling over time, a pattern which has been evident for quite a while now, which is a third threat to a business model like Facebook's.

In short, I don't think Facebook are anything like a $60B company. If you do, I assume you're investing heavily at this point, since you'll surely see a 50% ROI?

It's fashionable but trite to think Facebook will got "the same route" as properties before it. Pretty much the same thing gets said about any lasting company. It doesn't take much intelligenc or curiosity to consider that's not always the case.

Perhaps not. But usually it is, particularly in entertainment industries, and particularly in fast-moving tech industries. Ten years ago, Microsoft were riding high after the release of Windows XP, Apple were a has-been, a couple of guys had started a little company called Google that was attracting a bit of attention as an alternative search engine, and Facebook wouldn't even exist for several years.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/27/technology/facebook-report...