The upshot: the people with the best insight into Facebook's valuation voted on what it's truly worth. And those people were heading for the exits. Employees t

The upshot: the people with the best insight into Facebook's valuation voted on what it's truly worth. And those people were heading for the exits. Employees taking part in the buyback could sell stock equal to the lesser of 25 percent of their holdings or $1 million I don't really have a good idea how a facebook IPO would go, but I think it's easy to read too much into what the stock buyout says about the IPO prospects of facebook. Were I a current employee of facebook I'd be happy to lock in 25% of my gains at a $6.5 billion valuation even if I thought, on average, my stock might be worth more at an indeterminate future time. If the stock did exceptionally well, I'd still get a fortune out of the IPO, with the remaining 75% of my stock, and if the stock did poorly, I'd already have made a lot of money.