A company is legally required to go public when it has more than 500 shareholders. Google had significant cash reserves before going public and has never had a

A company is legally required to go public when it has more than 500 shareholders. Google had significant cash reserves before going public and has never had a period where they spent enough cash to go below what they received from the IPO. Facebook is in a similar position of having tons of cash and nothing to do with it. Not to mention, both companies delayed their IPO as long as legally possible, which strongly suggests that they wouldn't have filed if they could get away with it. That's not to say that there are no benefits from becoming a public company. It makes life much better for the employees who received stock options (though it doesn't provide as much of a benefit to, e.g., Larry Page and Sergey Brin). But it's fair to say that neither Google nor Facebook were enthusiastic about going public.