Twitter Rich

By Dian Vujovich

Wall Street’s talking heads had one heck of day yesterday as Twitter,  (TWTR), the negative cash flow and so far unprofitable  social media darling, went public.

In addition to making the already super rich super richer, if I had been lucky enough to grab a few thousand shares at its initial offering price of 26 bucks a share, I would have sold when TWTR hit somewhere in the 40’s and called it a very good day.

Heck, now that I think about it that kind of gain would make for a very good year never mind one day. After all, closing up 73 percent beats the performance of what most stock indices report in 1-year.

On that score, the most the DJIA has been up in a year kind-of-sort-of recently was in 1975 when the index gained 38 percent. The highest recent one-year gain for NASDAQ was in 1999 when it closed up 85 percent. So TWTR, moving up 70-some percent is a big deal that hopefully sparked some investors to take some money off the table.

As for Twitter’s future, everyone I know who uses it, loves it. A Pew study earlier this year found that teenagers are leaving Facebook for Twitter because “there is less drama” and the teens say it’s tougher for their parents to keep tabs on them when using this social media venue.

Pew research also showed that16 percent of adults use TWTR with 8 percent of them getting there news and information via tweets. That leaves 84 percent of adults who don’t.

Forty-five percent of news consumers at the site are between the ages of 18-29; 2 percent aged 65 and older.

And when it comes to brains, Twitterites out-smart Facebook users. Forty-percent have at least a bachelor’s degree. It’s 29 percent for Facebook users.

While there’s no doubt plenty of interest in Twitter, I’m not banking on the stock flying any more than it already has anytime soon. There simply is no wind to sustain any wind-beneath-my-wings growth.  Plus, once all sorts of ads start mucking it up, well,  nobody really likes all of those ads.

That said, the fortunes of many did indeed swell yesterday.

Wealth-X pointed to three already super wealthy guys who are now even wealthier.Richard Costolo saw his 7.7 million shares grow by  $145 million on paper  in one day between the IPO offering price of $26 and closing price of  $44.90 a share; Jack Dorsey, is 443 million bucks richer with his 23.5 million shares; and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is over $1 billion dollars wealthier (56.9 million shares).

Today, November 8, Twitter closed its second day of trading at $41.64 a share. That’s down from yesterday’s close of $44.90. Over 26 million shares traded.

My Twitter tweet:  Sell and rejoice. When was the last time you made 70 percent on a stock investment in 1-day, 1-year or even 5 years?