Sharespost is an online exchange for private equity that bills itself as "a low‐cost, efficient way to buy or sell private company shares." They made quite a splash when they debuted earlier this year, announcing that shares in Tesla had already changed hands at $10/share.
I think the usual rule of "caveat emptor" applies here, but the update today underlined what I see as a problem with Sharepost.com.
The June 16th report from NextUp Research (a snippet is pasted to the right--->), which was available when SharesPost launched and was provided to the media, valued Tesla at up to $822M, or $9 a share. This was based on 91,400,000 shares outstanding. The first Tesla shares supposedly traded at $10/share, giving Tesla an implied valuation of almost $1B! Many a headline was written to this effect.
Now look at the latest report, dated October 21, 2009. Apparently NextUp Research is even more bullish on Tesla, giving a valuation range of $1.05 to $1.24B. But the equivalent share price is only about $4 and change. What gives? In the new report, NextUp revised its estimate of shares outstanding to 222,900,000.
Bummer for those who bought shares at $9 on the basis of the original report! Adjusted for the new number of shares outstanding, they paid $9 for a share that apparently is now equivalent to $3.69 if you believe the new numbers. Ouch!
On their website, Sharepost says "At SharesPost, we set out to solve these problems while complying with the letter and spirit of the securities laws and protecting the interests of companies, investors and entrepreneurs. It’s a big problem and it requires us to balance some competing interests, but we think we’ve done it"
I'm not so sure about that...
