Yesterday, it was announced that Microsoft had bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million, valuing the social utility site at roughly $15 billion. The deal makes geeky twenty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, at least on paper, worth $5 billion. Talk about revenge of the nerds.

Silicon Alley Insider (which we're guessing is also made up of social misfits) says he deserves all this money because of his strategic intelligence. Here's how it's played out:

Facebook began as a Harvard-specific site through which students could rate each other's hotness in Zuckerberg's dorm room (possibly with some other people who have since sued him).

After reportedly almost getting kicked out of school for creating the site, and following the advice of hero Bill Gates, Zuckerberg dropped out to pursue Facebook full-time. Brave!

Zuckerberg raised huge amounts of venture capital and got Facebook to the point where it was being valued in the multi-billions, then turned down a measly $1 billion offer from Yahoo and then sparked a bidding war between Google and Microsoft. Super brave!

And now: ludicrous wealth is his!


With these piles of money have come comparisons to Bill Gates -- at $56 billion, the richest man in the world and, like Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout and tech geek.

But is it really a sure thing, that Zuckerberg is destined to one day take over Gates' role as Pocket-Protectored Ruler of the Universe?


Valleywag reports:

"If [Zuckerberg]'s ever able to cash out his initial $500,000 investment, it will prove one of the smartest moves in the history of the Valley. And if the Microsoft deal proves to be the last time Facebook is valued as high as $15 billion? Perhaps the most painful paper loss since the bubble burst."

Today, tech bloggers are hedging their bets and second-guessing each other's predictions.

Switched.com writes:

"Some, like Wired's Epicenter blog, think that Microsoft actually underpaid, and that Facebook may have been asking too much . . . Meanwhile, Peter Cohan over at BloggingStocks wonders why Microsoft is paying so much for a company that makes so little revenue. The answer, of course, is potential, and Cohan concludes by saying "'I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft's 1.6% stake will more than double today's $240 million when Facebook goes public.'"

Well, we have a feeling Facebook won't be cool forever, especially given that it uses vaguely troubling lingo like "poke." We've lived through the boom and bust of Friendster and MySpace (whose brand has been hit hard by, for example, this recent Dr. Phil show about an overweight, middle-aged mom who uses the formerly hip 'n trendy site to troll for sex).

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Once again, thanks to Facebook, "new friend requests" are popping up in our Inbox from our cousins in Rhode Island, who use it to post baby pictures, and from random friends and acquaintances, about whose love lives we now know -- thanks to the "hooked up," "dated," etc. tags, -- way, way too much.

Thanks, Mark.

Feeling left behind and want to understand what all the "interweb" fuss is about? Catch up via the viral video: