("Undervalued") Facebook won't be an IPO until 2012 or later

Seven years ago Peter Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for 10% of the company and was on Fox Business on Monday commenting about Facebook and business related issues.

Of prime importance to Facebook watchers is news about the status of the IPO that everyone knows eventually will come.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Facebook was holding off on its IPO for another couple of years and Thiel seems to confirm this line of thinking.

Warren Buffett to U.S. Taxpayers: Pound Sand Cry babies!!!

Some select Warren Buffett quotes this week:

“Sentiment has turned very sour in the last three or four or five months.”

“I hope we get over it pretty soon, because it’s not productive,’’ Buffett said. “We will come back regardless of how people feel about Washington, but it is not helpful to have people as unhappy as they are about what’s going on in Washington.”

“The truth is we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of gross domestic product,” Buffett said. “That’s stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.”

Mark Zuckerberg gets richer and Facebook celebrates by crashing

Mark Zuckerberg moved up the list on the Forbes Richest Americans list this week.

Zuckerberg profile

Since timing is a big part of life and other things, Facebook celebrated by crashing several times this week.

Techcrunch:::Facebook Gives A Post-Mortem On Worst Downtime In Four Years


Mashable:::Facebook Engineer Explains “Worst Outage in Over Four Years”

Not worth billions: A Subprime "Wall Street"

...Mr. Douglas's performance in the sequel measures up to Gekko's rep, but the rest of the movie is pumped up to the bursting point with gasbag caricatures, overblown sermons and a semicoherent swirl of events surrounding the economy's recent meltdown. The story certainly holds your attention, but it's a dramatic bubble about a financial bubble.

Although the action starts in 2001, the time frame soon shifts to 2008, and a superheated economic climate that even Gekko could not have envisioned. There's a nice irony in the veteran conniver coming on, during public appearances, as a cross between Cassandra and a common scold—he rails against speculation as the mother of all evils, and denounces leveraged debt.

But his preachments sound awfully familiar at this juncture, and they're played against a crisis that unfolds much too slowly to capture the frenzy of the September 2008 meltdown. In a fictionalized version of those events, an old-line investment bank with a strong resemblance to Lehman Brothers goes belly up, and all hell threatens to break loose in the media surround—Jim Cramer in full cry, Warren Buffett likening derivates to WMDs. Yet the fall of other dominoes is delayed while the scatterbrained script, by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, takes time out for Gekko's warnings, and plunges into the turgid complexities of a morality melodrama that involves the next Gordon Gekko—a provisionally idealistic young trader who falls under the old man's malign spell while making plans to marry his estranged daughter.

Shia LaBeouf plays the trader, Jake; he's effective within the limits of Mr. Stone's ham-fisted direction. (Jake's idealism is signaled by his ardent belief in the green promise of fusion energy.)...

WSJ movie review

Warren Buffett on American Consumer, Economic Outlook [Interview]

Warren Buffett on American Consumer, Economic Outlook [Interview]



Warren Buffett shares his latest thoughts on the American consumer's mood, economic policy, taxes and more. Aired today.

Bill Gates is the richest American

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., remains the richest American with estimated assets of $54 billion, according to Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of the 400 wealthiest Americans.

Warren Buffett, the chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., ranked second in the U.S. with $45 billion. Gates, 54, and Buffett, 80, were Nos. 1 and 2 last year.


Bloomberg article

Mark Cuban shares his opinion about Lebron James

Current billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, shared his thoughts with the Dallas Morning News about future billionaire Lebron James.....

"LeBron has every right to go wherever and do whatever, whatever team he wants to," Cuban said. "Going to the Heat was his choice, those guys working together. I don't even have a problem with the three of them working together, as long as they follow all of the NBA rules, which I think they did.

Where I think LeBron made a mistake, was in how he did it. I don't even have a problem that he had the tv show. But it turned out to be the largest public humiliation in the history of sports. He humiliated the organization, he humiliated the state of Ohio , the city of Cleveland. All of a sudden he became a bad guy, he lost a billion dollars in brand equity, give or take a couple bucks here or there. ...

"I told his folks that I think he got bad advice. It's not about 'Can he move?' He can move, he can play for any team. I think he picked the wrong team (chuckles). There's a team in Dallas that could have used him and that would have been better served but it's his choice. But the way he did it I thought was just a huge mistake."

Secret billionaire meeting. Don't tell.

Shhh. Secret billionaire meeting. Don't tell. Here's what happened:

For 25 years, legendary Wall Street strategist Byron Wien, now with The Blackstone Group, has held summer meetings with high net worth individuals to get their outlook on the global economy and investing. This year’s group, totaling fifty individuals and including more than 10 billionaires, was decidedly pessimistic on the U.S. economy, investment opportunities and the Obama administration.


“They saw the United States in a long-term slow growth environment with the near-term risk of recession quite real,” said Wien, in a commentary to Blackstone clients. “The Obama administration was viewed as hostile to business and that discouraged both hiring and investment. Companies and entrepreneurs were reluctant to add workers because they didn’t know what their healthcare costs or taxes were going to be.”

Again. Remember. Keep this quiet.


read article>>> CNBC article

Warren Buffett ... the former "credible, respected investor"

There was a time when Warren Buffett was actually a credible, respected investor, when his views were prescient, and when his every action was not predicated by some supreme hypocrisy merely seeking to perpetuate the ponzi market, and/or praise the status quo which forces his record bet on "endless" American growth to be aligned exclusively with what the Fed does each and every day, i.e., destroy the value of the dollar. Yet 7 short years ago, the very same Warren Buffett wrote a scathing op-ed in which he lamented the decline of the dollar, the surging US trade deficit, and pointed out that any profits he and Berkshire may make courtesy of his then brand new non-US FX longs, "would pale against the losses the company and our shareholders, in other aspects of their lives, would incur from a plunging dollar." Well, the dollar continues to plunge courtesy of QE, and the pain is about to be far more acute once Bernanke really gets involved in the next 3-6 months.


read::: Zerohedge.com

BK is consumed by Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann

Forbes Magazine is reporting that the fast food chain Burger King [Burger King Holdings (BKC) ] has agreed to be bought by private equity investment firm 3G Capital.

3G Capital is controlled by the Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann.