Twitter's IPO is #impressive

Public sale of shares leads to firm’s $31B valuation

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, uses his mobile phone as he waits for shares to begin trading during the IPO, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Twitter’s stock opened at $45.10 a share on Thursday, its first day of trading, 73 percent above its initial offering price.

NEW YORK — Shares of Twitter went on sale to the public for the first time Thursday, instantly leaping more than 70 percent above their offering price in a dazzling debut that exceeded even Wall Street’s lofty hopes.

By the closing bell, the social network that reinvented global communication in 140-character bursts was valued at $31 billion — nearly as much as Yahoo Inc., an Internet icon from another era, and just below Kraft Foods, the grocery conglomerate founded more than a century ago.

The stock’s sizzling performance seemed to affirm the bright prospects for Internet companies, especially those focused on mobile users. And it could invite more entrepreneurs to consider initial public offerings, which lost their luster after Facebook’s first appearance on the Nasdaq was married by glitches.

In Silicon Valley, the IPO produced another crop of millionaires and billionaires.

Twitter, which has never turned a profit in the seven years since it was founded, worked hard to temper expectations ahead of the IPO, but all that was swiftly forgotten when the market opened.

Still, most analysts don’t expect the company to be profitable until 2015. Investors will be watching closely to see whether Twitter was worth the premium price.

The most anticipated initial public offering of the year was carefully orchestrated to avoid the dysfunction that surrounded Facebook’s debut.

Trading on the New York Stock Exchange under symbol “TWTR,” shares opened at $45.10, 73 percent above their initial offering price.

In the first few hours, the stock jumped as high as $50.09. Most of those gains held throughout the day, with Twitter closing at $44.90.