A Mother of a Pop: LinkedIn Debut Stirs Up Bubble Talk

LinkedIn ended its first day as a public company with shares trading at $94.25, up 109 percent from their initial price.

Shares had surged as high as $122.70 during the day, bringing out the Macbeth witch chant from every market watcher not snatching up the stock. Double, double toil and trouble…Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Heck, even Jim Cramer was doing it.

LinkedIn now has a valuation of $8.9 billion, which is 578 times larger than its 2010 net income of $15.4 million. Revenues were $243 million in 2010 and $94 million in the first quarter of 2011, but revenue growth is slowing, something Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review urged bubble-calling journalists to mention.

Photo by Flickr user yourFAVORITEmartian.