Facebook's $100 Billion Question

As investors dug into the company's freshly released financials, analysts and investors began circulating a range of values -- from as little as $50 billion to as much as $125 billion -- for the social-networking website. It will be months before the market sets a final price, but already the valuation question has become a tug of war over two essential questions: Just how fast can the company continue to grow? And can it extract value from advertising in the way it plans?

The company views itself through a relatively conservative lens, pegging its value for employee stock grants at $29.73 per share, giving it a total valuation of $74 billion based on the company's share count of 2.5 billion. The calculation was performed in a period when the stock market had just suffered a downturn and some Internet stocks were struggling. Since then, Facebook shares have rebounded a bit in private marketplaces to trade at $32 to $33 a share, according to securities traders, which would imply a valuation of about $81 billion. That is around the low end of an expected range for the company's offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The high end is $100 billion.