Google’s Don Dodge: Q&A site StackOverflow’s valuation “gave me a heart attack”

It's not fake, people actually trade privately held shares on there. Significant amounts of privately held facebook shares have been bought and sold there and hence it's one of the sources of valuation.

He is right to say so though. I don't know about SO being worth 8 or 9 figures, that's very comical. If you don't think so, then I have a one way first class ticket to reality that i'd like to sell you for $4,200.

Exactly, if you are going to write an article about a shocking valuation, you might want to include said valuation.

As far as I know, only one of those questions has been answered publicly-- the middle one, and the answer is: "a group of investors lead by Union Square Ventures and including Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, Caterina Fake, Naval Ravikant, Nirav Tolia, Joshua Schachter, Micah Siegel, and Bob Pasker."

(Cf http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-...)

As you can see from the linked article, SO raised $6MM, but the terms and valuation have not been made public (as far as I know.)