Looks like jacquesm lost a bet http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689789 :).

To be fair, he said multiple billion in profit not revenue. Still has some ways to go.

The story was about revenue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689712

It's hard to believe that a fb board member could make more accurate revenue predictions than random people with strong opinions commenting on HN ;)

There's a second bet in there:

gojomo: "To be specific, I will bet $100 that Facebook's annual revenue will reach $2 billion/year by 2014. Do we have a bet?"

jacquesm: "absolutely."

In their S1, GOOG reported net income of $106M on $962M revenue.

src: https://twitter.com/#!/goldman/status/164830894685818880

Interestingly, Google 2011 revenues are $37b, profits $9.7b, ratio almost exactly the same. Google also has 10x the number of employees as FB. Of course FB growth is much faster.

Consider that in 1996, there were far fewer people on the internet/web. It doesn't really make sense to compare absolute revenue numbers. Growth rates and revenue per user would probably be more interesting.

1996? You must be thinking "Yahoo." Google IPOd in the following decade.

We're the 7 years of Google vs Facebook, comparing the growth from launch to IPO. Even in 2003, the amount of people and time spent online was far less than it is in 2012.

For example, there are an estimated 2 billion people online today, compared to 360 million in 2000.

The IAB estimated $1.7 billion total spend on online advertising in 4Q 2003. In 2011, over $7 billion in a quarter, a 7x increase. (http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press...)

Not as good. See here:

http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/00011931250407363...

Google filed for IPO earlier in the company's life, though. Year per year, Google made more than Facebook.