Mike Isaac

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Twitter Shares Soar on NYSE Debut

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The bird has flown the coop.

Twitter shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning, soaring nearly 75 percent to a first trade of $45.10, much above the $26 share price the company set on Wednesday evening.

At $45 per share, the company would be valued at about $30 billion, trading at about 30 times revenue.

The company’s public market debut came off almost entirely without a hitch, markedly different from the technical problems that plagued Facebook upon the social giant’s 2012 Nasdaq debut. Indeed, that has been Twitter’s exact goal, aiming for a low-profile Wall Street debut by covertly filing its S-1 and keeping its level of roadshow hype as muted as possible.

CEO Dick Costolo and company likely wanted to see a healthy pop upon the shares’ debut, something that both Facebook didn’t see when it went public. As Fortune’s Dan Primack argues, that may leave quite a bit of money on the table, but it also leaves investors with a positive first-day takeaway.

The early, bullish trading is all on the assumption that Twitter — a company that has yet to turn a profit — has a tremendous amount of upside potential. The 232-million-user service still has more than ample room to grow both domestically and internationally, dwarfed as it is by its closest competitor Facebook, which hosts more than a billion users on its platform.

Twitter isn’t immediately worried about profits, however — at least not in the near term. “All the capital raised today is going into the company,” Costolo said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday.

“I think its all about, now, the very long, long-term business we’re trying to build,” he said.

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google