“Most of them will be overpriced,” Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said today in New Delhi. ”It’s extremely difficult to value social- networking-site companies,” he said, without specifying companies. “Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest.”
Facebook Inc., owner of the most popular social-networking site, drew investors including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in private stock sales that valued the company at $50 billion as of January. Groupon Inc., the Chicago-based daily deals site, has held talks about an initial public offering that would value it at as much as $25 billion, two people familiar with the matter said earlier this month.
Buffett, 80, has shunned technology investments in favor of industrial, financial and consumer-goods holdings in his four decades at Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire.
Twitter Inc. , the microblogging site, said in December that it was valued at $3.7 billion after receiving a $200 million round of funding led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company’s value may now be closer to $5 billion, according to SharesPost Inc., a private-share exchange.
To contact the reporters on this story: Pooja Thakur in Bangalore at pthakur@bloomberg.net; Unni Krishnan in New Delhi at ukrishnan2@bloomberg.net; Andrew Frye in New York at afrye@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Arijit Ghosh at aghosh@bloomberg.net Dan Kraut at dkraut2@bloomberg.net;
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