The score card for Facebook currently says minus $750M. Breaking even or a small profit is not going to change that.
Facebook totally COULD be a successful, but they'll need to get some serious PROFITS (not revenues!) going to make that happen. Certainly within the realm of possibilities, but it hasn't happened yet.
I have a hard time with someone trying to assert facebook isn't a success. However, if you think success is 'profitable in 2010' then far out they are a failure.
This obsession with equity as debt is very strange to me. By this metric Apple is a hugely indebted company.
When you break down a company you look at assets and liabilities. Facebook has few liabilities in the form of debt because so many wealth individuals and institutions think having a stake in its future is a desirable proposition. I would call most of their assets the intangible ones of being of the most visited, used, and widely-known websites in the world. If you think this is worthless, okay. But I think its a little bizarre to assert they are $750M in the hole.
Equity is different from debit, yes, but when you talk about how much money you are making, it really only makes sense to talk about how much money you are making based on how much money was invested. If you have 1mil invested, and you are making 1 mil a year, that's pretty goddamn impressive. If you have 750 million invested, and you are making 1 million a year profit, well, gee, I could do better than that buying bonds.
Now, Both AAPL and facebook have the P/E ratios they have because people expect them to make more money in the future than they are making now. For instance, if I was to sell my company (and I've had a few offers) it looks like I'd get about a year worth of revenue. This is pretty typical when buying ISPs, because nobody expects exponential growth to go on for any period of time.
Just sayin; It is a reasonable and well-established idea to look at how much equity is invested when looking at a company's profit margins. It's also reasonable and well-established to look forward at how much profit the company is expected to make in the future, too, which is why facebook is valued as it is by some people.
(there is, however, a great degree of uncertainty in projecting what profits a company may make in the future, which is why there is a great deal more controversy over the value of twitter than over the value of AAPL. Personally, if there was a convenient way to buy a long-term 'put' on twitter, I'd do it. Just my opinion,)
It is interesting to theorize what a stock price for a firm that cannot be purchased by another firm (at least extraordinarily unlikely to be purchased) and that doesn't pay dividends means.
People about all sorts of measures of return. However, very few talk about equity being debt.