Yeesh. What manner of ungodly sum is Facebook worth these days? $5 Billion, thanks to a new investment from the deep pockets at Goldman Sachs, who plunked down $500 million for the social networking site.
Remember how shocked everyone was when AOL bought Time Warner back in 2000–and not the other way around? Well, you might want to sit down for this–the new valuation puts Facebook’s valuation at more than Time Warner, Yahoo, and eBay.
A number of folks are speculating that such a valuation might end up convincing the company to go public with its stocks earlier than planned. At present, however, it doesn’t appear that Zuckerberg’s company has any plans to do so at least until 2012.