TWITTER announces secret $20 billion IPO, Investors, public will not yet get look at company finances, GOLDMAN SACHS lead underwriter

TWITTER announces secret $20 billion IPO
Twitter has filed for an initial public offering of stock, months earlier than expected.

The 7-year-old microblogging site announced the news — via tweet, of course — on Thursday afternoon: “We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”
A minute later, Twitter followed up its IPO tweet with a new message: “Now, back to work” along with a photo of employees in the company’s San Francisco offices.
Twitter’s valuation has been estimated at about $10 billion.
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-twitter-ipo-20130912,0,6439890.story

Investors, public will not yet get look at company finances
Updated, 10:22 p.m. | Twitter, which began as a side project in a small but failing start-up seven years ago and grew into one of the world’s largest platforms for public conversation, is about to take its biggest step yet into maturity: selling stock to the public.
The company announced on Thursday — in a tweet, one of the 140-character messages that are the backbone of the service — that it had filed paperwork with regulators to eventually sell shares in an initial public offering. However, it had filed the first documents months earlier under a special provision of securities law that allows a company with less than $1 billion in annual revenue to keep its financial data secret until it begins actively marketing its stock to investors.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/twitter-confidentially-submits-plans-for-i-p-o/?hp&_r=0
GOLDMAN SACHS lead underwriter
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS -1.04%is the lead underwriter on the planned initial stock sale, people familiar with the matter said. One person familiar with the matter said other banks are expected to join Goldman in managing what is likely to be one of the highest-profile IPOs since Facebook went public in the spring of last year. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.
Twitter has already achieved a valuation of more than $9 billion, as judged by private sales by employees of their stock to BlackRock Inc. BLK +0.19% earlier this year, people familiar with that transaction have said. Such a valuation would still put Twitter well behind Facebook, which went public with a valuation of about $100 billion. After initially struggling, Facebook shares hit a new all-time high this week and now trade above their IPO price.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323392204579071511038487586.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories