On Wednesday night, Twitter announced it would set its shares at $26, but when the stock made its first appearance on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday morning, the first trade was $45.10 a share. At one point, the price hit $50.09 a share, and then dropped to $45.80 later on that morning. Twitter is now valued at $25 billion.
The company is certainly relieved that its entrance onto Wall Street was more successful than Facebook’s. Investors were hesitant about Twitter’s IPO partially because of how Facebook did in its first weeks. “We tried to have a very clean process … the team that worked on it inside the company was very methodical,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said on CNBC. As of the middle of the day Thursday, 74 million of Twitter’s shares were exchanged.
Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams is the largest individual shareholder, and has a 12% stake worth around $2.6 billion. Board of directors’ member Peter Fenton has a stake worth $1.4 billion, and CEO Dick Costolo has a $346 million stake.
