Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

And They’re Off! Groupon IPOs With a Pop.

If you’re looking for a discount on Groupon shares you’re going to be out of luck this morning.

Get it? Hohoho.

So: As you may have heard, Groupon began trading this morning, and the stock immediately leapt up from its $20 per share open to $28. That’s a 40 percent leap, and it made CEO Andrew Mason, at least temporarily, worth around $1.3 billion.

That number also valued the entire company around $18 billion — about three times what Google offered to pay for the daily deals innovator last year.

Obviously, the number is going to bounce around throughout the day, so we’ll revisit this at least once more. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming …

 

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald