Goldman Sachs and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies have invested $500 million into Facebook in a deal that values the social network at $50 billion—more than eBay, Yahoo! and Time Warner. What's cool now, Justin Timberlake?
Russia's Digital Sky Technologies might be the toast of Silicon Valley, but the investment firm gives the Russian founder of Chatroulette the creeps. Sometimes it takes a teenager to say the obvious, rude things adults can't bring themselves to utter.
Alisher Usmanov is nicknamed "the hard man of Russia," but he's good at seducing the softies in California's tech community: An investment firm he backs lead a $180 million investment in Zynga, the gaming company that trafficked in scammy ads.
Who says foreign investors are done handing money to risky Americans? Russia's Digital Sky Technologies just started cashing out employee shares in Facebook, a $100 million investment. The move was expected; the implications will take longer to settle in.
It seems Facebook's new investor is keen to downplay its ties with "the hard man of Russia," an oligarch one critic called a "gangster and racketeer." How inconvenient, then, that said oligarch is reportedly buying up more shares.
The Financial Timesreports that "among the biggest backers" of Facebook's new funder is Alisher Usmanov. He might be playing sugar daddy to a freewheeling social network, but the Russian oligarch is also known as a "devourer of websites" that dared to mention certain allegations about his past.
Facebook accepted a rumored funding round, taking $200 million from a Russian investment group. The deal values the company at $10 billion, a third less than what the company was supposedly worth a year and a half ago. But it could have been far worse.