Break out a fresh bottle of schadenfreude, because the once untouchable and invaluable Facebook stock is on a fast slide towards a rocky bottom. The trouble started last Thursday — well, some would argue that it really started the day of Facebook’s overpriced IPO in May — when Facebook’s three-month lockup period came to a close, meaning insiders can finally shed their shares. And boy, did they. The day the lockup expired, Facebook unlocked 271.1 million shares and 157.6 million shares were traded, three times the daily average of 48.7 million. A day later, more than 129 million shares were traded. Unsurprisingly, the stock price plummeted to an all time low of $18.75, less than half of the IPO price.This is only the beginning, too. Between now and November, another 1.44 billion shares will flood the market, and analysts say that the stock slide will continue. "The company is suffering from a classic disease — it went public at too high a value," Westwood Capital partner Dan Alpert told The New York Times. Not even Facebook’s believe in the stock enough to hold on to it. Peter Thiel, the social network’s first friend in venture capital and a member of its board of directors, has sold more than 20 million shares. That’s over a billion dollars’ worth.It would be one thing if Facebook’s implosion happened only on account of an inflated IPO price, but the problems run deeper than that. As Alpert went on to explain, Wall Street types are worried that Facebook is nothing but a fad and that the company hasn’t shown any real plans for making money. Investors are particularly worried about the social network’s plans to build a revenue model on mobile, where there currently aren’t any ads. Furthermore, can Facebook be the obscenely profitable company it’s supposed to be by selling ads alone?Obviously, pundits are looking for someone to blame, and obviously, that person is Mark Zuckerberg. As doubts abound about his ability to run a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company, it’s also increasingly apparent that he’s fast losing his status as Silicon Valley’s wonderboy. “Today, in contrast, he is written off as an embarrassment — totally out of his league and too immature to run a big company,” explains Mark Hulbert at MarketWatch. “A popular parlor game has become betting on when he will be forced out.”As analysts snicker on the sidelines, it’s easy to call this whole downfall inevitable. It’s almost as if everybody saw this coming. The Times‘s Somini Sengupta was out at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus recently and smelled it in the air. “Inside Facebook's headquarters, a red-and-white poster affixed to a wall asks bluntly: ‘What Could Go Wrong?’” Sengupta noticed. “Below, in black ink, someone has scrawled in tiny letters: ‘Everything.’”
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