You cannot fail to have noted that Google is floating its shares in a rather unconventional manner and expects to raise a rather mind-googling $2.7 billion. The unorthodox prospectus has drawn criticism, nay derision, from conventional quarters. For an alternative view, see John Naughton’s column in the Observer. He notes that:
“The ‘proposed maximum aggregate offering price’ … $2.718281828 billion … is a very special number … ‘e’ – the base of natural logarithm. With the possible exception of pi, e is the most important constant in mathematics since it appears in every calculation involving limits and derivatives. If Larry Page and Sergey Brin could sneak this mathematical in-joke past their lawyers, then theirs was going to be no ordinary prospectus.”
UK investors sould not be too miffed that they are being excluded. Jack Schofield in Guardian Online notes that:
“at perhaps 25 times sales and 250 times current profits, the IPO looks like a way for Google insiders to get rich, not investors.”
