The IPO tweet heard around the Twitterverse: reaction on Twitter
SAN FRANCISCO -- It was the tweet heard around the Twitterverse: “We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”
Twitter’s surprise announcement of its long-awaited initial public offering unleashed a firestorm of responses.
“I guess you might say Twitter’s IPO has been ... Verified,” technology investor Hunter Walk quipped, referring to Twitter’s practice of “verifying” the accounts of celebrities and other well-known people. He later said he was canceling his afternoon meetings to continue cracking “bad Twitter IPO jokes.”
Many tweets mocked the company for its not-so-confidential way of revealing the filing of its “confidential” IPO.
“Super confidential, guys,” tweeted Ben Schaechter, a mobile product manager at Yahoo.
Others reflected on the dramatic transformation of the 7-year-old company.
Technology investor and blogger MG Siegler summed it up this way: “From ‘that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of’ to ‘no one outside tech will ever use that’ to ‘that will never make any money’ to IPO.”
As for the guys with the biggest stakes in the Twitter IPO, mum was the word during the company’s government-mandated quiet period.
Twitter’s Chief Executive Dick Costolo tweeted he was reading a Q&A with Tahar Ben Jelloun regarding his short story “By Fire.” He also commented jokingly on random, non-IPO related conversation threads.
Of Twitter’s three co-founders, Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, Dorsey was the only one to obliquely refer to the IPO by linking to the “post that launched Twitter.”
Stone made his own statement by retweeting Twitter’s announcement.
But it was journalist Kevin Roose who put it all in perspective: Twitter’s announcement that it was going public had at the time garnered 7,500 retweets. Justin Bieber just saying “hi” had nearly 66,000.
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