Facebook faces the music

Now, haven't we all been here before?    No lessons learned from the same shenanigans before on Wall Street's "crew" of the usual suspects, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, et al.   And of course, no one - not even the man in the White House despite all the huffing and puffing - to reign in these cowboys on Wall Street.  

First, this, as reported in The Guardian:

"Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone from hero to zero as the stockmarket flotation of the decade flounders amid lawsuits and accusations of greed, hype and deception.

The law firm that won a $7bn settlement for Enron's shareholders is pursuing Zuckerberg, his board and the long list of banks advising the company for making "untrue statements" about its financial performance.

Robbins Geller is bringing the second class action law suit in as many days against Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and a host of Silicon Valley luminaries including PayPal guru Peter Thiel. A separate suit filed in California on Tuesday by investor Darryl Lazar claims that the social network's share prospectus contained "materially false and misleading statements".

The regulators are also closing in. Mary Schapiro, chair of America's main financial watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, said: "I think there is a lot of reason to have confidence in our markets and in the integrity of how they operate, but there are issues that we need to look at specifically with respect to Facebook."

And some background, via The Daily Beast, on the "charming" Mr Zuckerburg:

"But none of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has been following Facebook in recent years. Since its origin in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, the company has been dogged by complaints by people who felt tricked and ill-treated by CEO and cofounder Mark Zuckerberg.

First came allegations that Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from fellow Harvard students, and a lawsuit that Facebook settled.

Zuckerberg insisted that he didn’t steal the idea, though he had agreed to write code for the other guys who were creating their own social network. And in an instant-message exchange from that time, Zuckerberg said of the guys who had hired him, “I’m going to fuck them. Probably in the ear.”

Then came reports that, while he was a student, Zuckerberg had hacked into the private email of reporters at The Harvard Crimson, and had hacked into the rival social network created by the guys he’d threatened to “fuck in the ear,” in order to disrupt its operations.

Then there emerged an IM string from the early days of Facebook, in which Zuckerberg offered to give a pal access to private information that Facebook was collecting from people who had joined the service, saying, “They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”

Then one of his cofounders, Eduardo Saverin, sued Zuckerberg claiming he’d been defrauded, after his stake in the company was diluted. Later, emails emerged revealing that Zuckerberg asked his lawyers if there’s “a way to do this without making it painfully apparent to him that he’s being diluted.”

Then came Mark Pincus, an early investor in Facebook and adviser to Zuckerberg who believed so strongly in the company that he built his own company, Zynga, to make social games that run on top of Facebook. That worked fine until Zynga started making money, at which point Zuckerberg changed the rules and said that, from now on, Zynga would have to give Facebook a 30 percent cut of the revenues it generated on Facebook. Pincus was furious, but where could he go? His whole business was built on Facebook.

Then came Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users, who signed up for the service under one set of privacy rules only to have Zuckerberg change them after the fact, in ways that force them to reveal more about themselves—leading Facebook, in 2011, to settle charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission that said the company had made “unfair and deceptive” claims and had violated federal law. (Facebook did not admit guilt when it settled.)"