Twitter Fritter v.1

Fritter verb. 1. To reduce or squander little by little: frittered his inheritance away. See Synonyms at waste.

Today was the IPO of Twitter, Inc., a dotcom company that lets you send short messages and read the short messages of many others at once. The stock had a monster opening day closing at $44.90 per share giving Twitter a market capitalization of $24.93 billion. Good for Twitter!

I did not participate in the euphoria, partly because Twitter is a company that has never made a profit in 7 years of operation. It has consistently lost money every quarter of its existence. The current earnings per share are -$1.11 (negative). They can probably make it up in volume. What Twitter has, like many dotcom companies of the late 1990s, is eyeballs. Yeah, that is the true measure of value when picking a stock, how many eyeballs do they have? (sarcasm alert).

Now that they are public, the lucky investors will get to see quarterly reports of the revenue, expenses, and profits, if any ever materialize. Of course, nothing matters now for the owners if they were smart enough to sell massive shares into the euphoric IPO. They can retire and walk away. For fun, I plan to track the total profits of Twitter for the life of the company and see how it compares to the market valuation of $24.93 billion. I am hoping that the first quarterly report will show at least $1 billion in profits, but I am somewhat skeptical. I will make inflation adjustments annually.

To be fair, I won't count any of their last 7 years, or 28 straight quarters of losses. We'll start with a clean slate of zero. Good luck, Twitter!