LIVE UPDATES: Twitter Goes Public

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Twitter has officially become a publicly traded company.

The seven-year-old social network started offering shares on the New York Stock Exchange at 10:50 a.m. on Thursday, in the most anticipated tech IPO since Facebook’s in May 2012. The company, which set its initial IPO pricing at $26, saw the share price open at $45.10 due to strong investor demand. The initial surge in price gave the company a valuation above $24 billion when it began trading shares. Twitter seems confident about investor appetite for its stock; it boosted the initial share price by 30 percent in the days leading up to the IPO.

Stay tuned to TIME.com throughout the day for live updates on Twitter’s IPO.


12:54 p.m. – Already Time to Sell?

Twitter’s surprisingly successful IPO has already convinced some analysts that the company is overvalued. Brian Wieser, an analyst for Pivotal Research Group, has already downgraded Twitter to a sell, according to the New York Times, with a price target of $30. “With a price that pushes into the high 30s and beyond, Twitter is simply too expensive,” he told the Times. The company’s shares are trading at the very top end of analysts’ publicly disclosed predictions.


12:30 p.m. Twitter’s Rich Are Even Richer

Yesterday we laid out exactly how much money Twitter’s biggest shareholders stood to make once the stock went public at a highend price of $25. With huge demand pushing the stock to open at $45.10, here’s how much money some of Twitters’ insiders can now take to the bank:

Ev Williams, founder, 41 – $2.57 billion on 56.9 million shares

Jack Dorsey, chairman, 36 – $1.06 billion on 23.5 million shares

Dick Costolo, 50, CEO – $346.2 million on 7.7 million shares

Adam Bain, president of global revenue, 40 – $80.5 million on 1.8 million shares

Peter Currie, director, 57 – $13.5 million on 300,000 shares


12:10 p.m. – Twitter Sees a Quick Surge, Then Steady

Twitter’s stock got a 73 percent boost from its IPO pricing of $26 when it opened for trading around 10:50 a.m. The stock shot up another 11 percent in its first ten minutes of trading to about $50 but has since settled back down near its initial price of $45.10. It’s trading at $45.85 as of 12.08 p.m.


11:33 a.m. – Just setting up their $twtr 

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (whose shares of Twitter are worth more than $1 billion based on the stock’s $45.10 opening price today) offers an homage to the first message ever on the social network.


11:26 a.m. – Some Twitter Fundamentals 

Investors everywhere now have an opportunity to own a piece of Twitter. Here are some key facts about the company to consider before calling your broker:

Users: Twitter has 230 million monthly active users as of September—53 million in the United States and 179 million in international markets. That’s a 39 percent increase from September 2012, but growth of the social network is slowing from its breakneck pace in early years. It has less than a fifth of the userbase of Facebook, which now has 1.19 billion monthly active users.

Revenue: Twitter generates almost all its revenue from advertising, through products like promoted tweets and promoted trending topics. The company has generated $422 million in revenue so far in 2013, and is expected to generate almost $1 billion in revenue next year.

Profits: Twitter has none. The company posted a net loss of $134 million in the first nine months of 2013. Analysts don’t anticipate profits from Twitter until 2015, according to Bloomberg. This makes the company’s IPO markedly different from those of Google and Facebook, two companies that were already profitable when they went public.

Mobile: Twitter has already become adept at monetizing mobile users, with 70 percent of their advertising revenue in the last quarter coming from mobile usage. This is a key metric that investors obsess over as more and more users surf the Web with mobile devices. Continued strength in mobile could help keep Twitter’s stock afloat. It was Facebook’s successful adoption of a mobile-first strategy and big revenue in the mobile space that allowed its stock to recover this summer after a disappointing IPO.


10:55 a.m. – It’s Up!

Twitter is now trading on the New York Stock Exchange.


10:31 a.m. – A Big Initial Pop Expected

A variety of sources on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange are reporting that investors anticipate that Twitter shares will open somewhere in the range of $42 to $47, up to an 80 percent increase from the initial IPO price. The opening price will differ from the IPO price due to a process called “price discovery,” in which the stock’s underwriters and a designated market maker determine an appropriate initial price for public trading based on the amount of demand for the stock the night before the IPO and in early hours before open trading begins.


10:08 a.m. – NYSE Gets Twitter-fied

The New York Stock Exchange the morning of Twitter’s IPO:


10:05 a.m. – Twitter’s Opening Bell Ringers

While Twitter executives Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo were on hand at the opening of the New York Stock Exchange, they handed the honors of ringing  the opening bell over to some of their users: actor Patrick Stewart, a representative from the Boston Police Department and Vivienne Harr, a nine-year-old who sold lemonade to raise money to end child slavery. Here they are opening the NYSE for the day: