Confirmed: Facebook to let employees sell some stock

Facebook has confirmed that its letting its employees sell some stock, specifically to provide a “financial cushion” as the company stays private and continues to grow. Here’s the text of what the company sent over.

“Facebook is committed to achieving its mission – to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected – over the long-term. To provide employees with a financial cushion while we continue to build the company, Facebook has designed a one-time program to enable employees to realise some liquidity. Because this is an internal program for employees only, we are not making details of it available outside of the company.”

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Note: Silicon Alley Insider also hears that Facebook is letting employees buy stock, as part of the deal.

Unfortunately for some of the commenters on my story from yesterday, at this time there’s no further information available about how the process of selling (or buying) Facebook stock would work.

Also, LinkedIn, a company we understand to be implementing a similar stock option program, has not yet responded to confirm or deny. However, for those interested in LinkedIn shares, the data analysis team over at VC Experts recently put together a detailed calculation and concluded that LinkedIn’s latest post-money valuation is more than $1 billion. This matches up with what the company has said publicly about its own worth.

In case you’re wondering why LinkedIn’s reportedly internal valuation for its employee stock is $500 million,  as some commenters asked on that story, the reason is that this number reflects what it reported to the Internal Revenue Service by law. Companies sometimes have two valuations, with the more expensive one being for preferred stockholders — preferred stock comes with uniquely valuable rights — and the lower valuation being for common stock, with fewer rights. Employees get common stock, at the lower valuation.