Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The Facebook IPO now seems so long ago, now that everyone is complaining about how it was screwed up.

I'm resting up a bit this week and spending some quality time with what I think could be the next big social-media site, Quora. Head on over there and watch me answer some questions. And watch other Quorians do it, too.

But I do need to update everyone on the Facebook IPO mess. And it's a very big mess. You can read the Wall Street Journal's blow-by-blow here, or jump over to Business Insider and read Henry Blodget all but accuse Facebook CFO David Ebersman of violating SEC rules (which is ironic, given that Blodget himself is banned for life from the securities business for breaking the rules). At Reuters, Felix Salmon offers his own analysis — also laying much blame on Ebersman, but pointing to Morgan Stanley lead technology banker Michael Grimes as someone who botched his job.

Circumstantially, it seems what happened — apart from the computer screw-ups by NASDAQ that delayed trading on Friday — is that several of the major banks involved in the Facebook IPO, such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, cut their estimates for Facebook's second-quarter and full 2012 financial performance during the IPO "road show." They were motivated by Ebersman allegedly conveying information to them, as well as by an amended IPO filing with the SEC. 

Meanwhile, demand for Facebook stock was building, so Facebook and the banks decided to sell more — and to price the offering at the upper end of the range, choosing $38 per share. Blodget suggests that this price was well above what institutional investors, clients of the underwriters, were willing to pay — $32 — and below what uninformed retail investors might pony up: $40. 

So the stock trades early in Friday at $42 or so, hits $45 and then hangs around $40 before falling back to just above $38 by day's end — and only staying there at the close because Morgan Stanley spent millions and possibly billions to support the IPO price.

What we ended up with was a lot of selling (Facebook moved about 422 million shares on Friday) followed by a lot buying (creating all those Facebook millionaires and billionaires) followed by a lot of selling and, on Morgan Stanley's part, a LOT of buying to keep the price above $38 (to prevent the bank from looking like it blew the biggest tech IPO of all time). 

That second round of selling is where the problems are. Once Facebook got above $40, everyone who knew it might be worth only $32 could sell and pocket what little upward price movement (I hesitate to call it a "pop") there was on the stock's first day. And wouldn't you know it! Facebook, after four days of trading, is now priced at...right about $32!

It's completely unclear whether anyone did anything truly wrong here — as in go-to-jail wrong — but it does seem that Ebersman, who before the IPO looked heroic for manhandling Wall Street and running the IPO from Silicon Valley, could be "thrown to the wolves," as Michael Arrington rather bluntly puts it.

But, high above the Earth's surface and miles away from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, everything is humming along quite well for SpaceX, the other California company that's had a lot going on this past week.

Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter. And as Matt questions at Quora

University of Arizona

The famous (and infamous) Biosphere2 is now owned and operated as a science lab by the University of Arizona.

This has been making the bloggy rounds since last week. The YouTube video embedded below is from a TED U talk that Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist, gave earlier this year in Long Beach. Hanauer was miffed that his talk wasn't posted on the TED site and took his case to the media, namely National Journal.

Accusations of censorship arose: the talk wasn't posted because Hanauer said that the rich aren't job creators, it was alleged, and TED's Chris Anderson didn't help matters by sending Hanauer an email indicating that the talk was "out and out political." Then Anderson wrote a blog post explaining the whole thing in more detail. And then the Hanauer talk somehow got posted, although Hanauer agreed that the quality wasn't great, acknowledging Anderson's point.

Hanauer is indeed a partner at Second Avenue Partners. The firm looks to have invested about $6.5 million in two companies over the past two years and have been involved in much larger deals over the past decade, according to CrunchBase. 

But what's really interesting comes from Hanauer's bio on the Second Avenue website: "Hanauer serves on the boards of the Cascade Land Conservancy, The University of Arizona’s Mt Lemmon Science Center and the Biosphere2; a University of Arizona climate research project." [My emphasis]

Back in the 1990s, Biosphere2 was an object of fascination and ridicule that cost $200 million to build near Tucson in Arizona. Columbia University took it over in 1995, after two batches of "biospherians" were sealed inside the environment, to test hypotheses about how environments function and sustain themselves.

What came next was flat-out weird, as the New York Times reported in 1996:

The would-be Eden became a nightmare, its atmosphere gone sour, its sea acidic, its crops failing, and many of its species dying off. Among the survivors are crazy ants, millions of them.

Rather than aiming to recreate paradise, Columbia is now working to make and sustain its opposite -- a kind of atmospheric hell that threatens to choke the globe late next century with high temperatures and high levels of carbon dioxide, a principal agent of global warming. Some organisms in the experiment are expected to thrive, and others to die.

To that end, Columbia is now clearing out old growths and animals, planning new ones and beginning to subdivide the would-be paradise into experimental plots, curious to see if the three acres of futuristic domes here can serve as a scientific testbed for anticipating the effects of a warming climate, and perhaps avoiding negative ones.

Columbia was out by 2005, and the University of Arizona came along in 2007. Eventually, the University took over the whole thing, getting the real estate from a developer who owned the property, along with a $20-million gift from the Philecology Foundation, a legacy of Biosphere2's original funder, Edward Bass.

Hanauer is no longer on the board; his term ended in 2010 (no gotcha stuff here about his bio — I just don't think he's updated it). I checked with the University of Arizona to find out what its plans are for Biosphere2, and a spokesperson told me that the facility is still very much about science, although not of the dire variety described in the NYT story from 1996. The idea is to experiment on a controlled scale, then apply the results to the real world.

Biosphere2 remains an attraction, as well: it gets 100,000 visitors per year, according to the University of Arizona.

So why was Hanauer interested in a such an offbeat project in the first place? I called him up to ask, but he's currently traveling (I'll post a follow-up if and when he gets back to me). Biosphere2, as a means to study the Earth's ecosystem, is consistent with Hanauer's rather eclectic career blend of VC, activism, and political metaphor-making.

For example, he's co-authored two books with former Clinton administration speechwriter Eric Liu, the most recent titled "The Gardens of Democracy." Hanauer and Liu explained what the title means in an interview last year: "In reality, society is a garden, not a machine. It's a complex adaptive system. An economy or civic body no more self-regulates than a garden self-tends. Gardens require gardeners — to seed, to feed, and to weed."

The dustup over his TED talk made Hanauer look kind of petulant, but when you drill down into his background and what he's up to, he comes off as a new kind of intellectual: the venture-lectual, someone who has achieved a certain amount of success in contemporary business, finance and the innovation economy and now wants to expand that experience into intriguing new places. You might not agree with the message in his TED talk, but people like this are worth keeping an eye on as politicians get more aggressive about stressing innovation as the key to America's economic recovery.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'm taking a bit of a breather this week, so posting will be light. However, I'm staying busy over at Quora, answering some questions and seeing if the site deserved its recent $50 million venture round!

Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter.

SpaceX

The Dragon capsule, developed and built by Hawthorne-based SpaceX. On Saturday, it will be launched in the first-ever private mission to service the International Space Station.

Just for the sake of argument, let's say Facebook's highly touted IPO was a flop, priced at $38 a share and closing just 23 cents above that figure. There's another California company that's staging a big event this weekend, and it has nothing to do with Wall Street. 

It may wind up being remembered for far longer.

On Saturday, before dawn at the Kennedy Space Flight center in Florida, the L.A.-area's own SpaceX will launch a rocket tipped with a capsule designed to perform an experimental service mission for the International Space Station. This marks the first time a private company will perform a mission traditionally handled by NASA or a state-run space agency. 

From the Christian Science Monitor:

For NASA, the mission represents the first test of its new stance as a customer for launch services to low-Earth orbit. No longer is it the organization sitting in the driver's seat from rocket design through launch to landing. Once the Falcon 9 leaves the pad, control of the mission shifts to SpaceX's command center at its Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters. Only when Dragon closes in on the space station will NASA have thumbs-up or thumbs-down say in the test flight's next steps.

Hawthorne is just down the road from the city of Los Angeles. It's nothing new to have spacecraft managed from the L.A. area; the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena controls missions to Mars from right next door to the Rose Bowl. It's just that SpaceX is a startup, whose CEO, Elon Musk, represents a slightly different view of America's business future than Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Musk was a co-founder of PayPal and went on to become CEO of Tesla Motors, the electric car startup that staged an IPO in 2010, as well as SpaceX (he's also Chairman of SolarCity, an alternative energy company). At 40, he's the divorced father of five. It doesn't seem that he's ever worn a Zuckerbergian hoodie.

And of course Mark Zuckerberg hasn't blasted a rocket into Earth orbit. The two CEOs have divergent strategies but similar visions for the future of humanity. Zuck wants to pursue Facebook's mission of uniting the world, through seamless communications and social interactions. Musk wants to inspire people to explore space and enable the private sector to make it happen. Musk works in the actual world. Zuck hacks away in the virtual realm.

Zuck and Musk. Zuck v. Musk.

However you want to look at it, both men are experiencing big events in the span of 48 hours. Both are Californians (though neither are natives). And in both cases, the big events are occurring in traditional bastions of the business that Zuck and Musk are in: New York, the capital of finance and media; and Florida, where the U.S. space program has roots that run deep.

Facebook kind of fizzled in its debut. Let's hope SpaceX has better luck.

Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter.

The DeBord Report Twitter feed. Truth in advertising: I was actually following and tweeting from @mattdebord today about Facebook.

If you wanted to follow the Facebook IPO today and get the kind of crisp insight that helped you understand what was going on and maybe develop a few storylines, you wouldn't have turned to Facebook itself, nor would you have stayed glued to CNBC, which seemed to playing catchup with...

Twitter!

Yes, Twitter, that other kindasorta social network that's really an (increasingly mobile) breaking news and opinion service. 

Twitter is sometimes seen as a sad stepchild to lordly Facebook, but despite the intense levels of engagement that some generate on Facebook, when stuff is happening in the world, Twitter shines.

I went on the "Patt Morrison" show right after the markets closed and basically kept myself informed in the postgame not by studying the subtitled in-studio comments of Erin Burnett on CNN but by keeping one eye on my BlackBerry's Twitter feed, which was churning out real-time 140-word analysis.

This is just the latest and most intense experience I've had with Twitter, which I've used to "watch" sporting events in the past. I had not yet observed a major IPO on Twitter. And while Facebook's IPO might has been a bit of a flop, it could be time to look toward Twitter's with anticipation.

Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The share price of newly debuted Facebook stock is seen at the Nasdaq stock market moments after it went public on May 18, 2012. The highly touted IPO for the social network fizzled after some early froth.

Well, that was a disaster. Facebook closed its first day of trading at just above its offering price of $38 per share. Mark Zukerberg did say that it wasn't Facebook's mission to be a public company, after all, and it looks like he got his wish to at least have it not be the company that brought the Everyday Joe, retail investor back into the market.

Two new subplots. First, you can't believe how tense it was to watch the market close, as Facebook got precariously close to "breaking the IPO" by dipping below $38. That would have been a debacle for Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter in the offering. My Twitter feed was on fire for the last half hour of trading with tweets about how Morgan was waging an "epic battle" to hold that $38 line (@TheStalwart and @carney — Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider and John Carney of CNBC, respectively, were all over it). Who knows how much money they spent to buy shares, on trading volume that hit 460 million in a single session, a new record.

Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, wound up worth $19 billion. Other investors and Facebook employees became multi-billionaires and multi-millionaires. As a vehicle for realizing the goals of venture capitalists, Facebook did its job and then some. But as an IPO...well, it wasn't like Zuck & Co. even wanted to do one, so perhaps we got the IPO we, and Facebook, deserved. 

However, even though Facebook didn't deliver much of a first-day "pop" — 10 or 15 percent would have been nice — it still held a higher price level than just a week ago. Should the company and its underwriters have stuck with a price around $30? $25? There might have been more money made, but it would have been money made on trading, not money that went to the company or its early investors.

On a bummer note for California, because Facebook DIDN'T close at the speculative top of its trading range — say, $45ish per share — the state won't be getting quite the massive windfall it was expected. It will still get a lot. But with a $16 billion budget deficit, they're probably not exactly dancing jigs in Sacramento tonight.

We'll be chewing this over for a few days. And on Monday, trading begins anew. So what do you think? Will Facebook head lower, or higher?

Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter.