Deck Stacked Against the Little Guy

From Rich Karlgaard on Forbes.com about Facebook’s IPO:

“Facebook left nothing for the common investor.  The insider pig pile of PE firms and celebrity Silicon Valley angels took it all.  This is a rather new, post-Sarbanes-Oxley fact and it should make Americans very, very angry.  When Microsoft went public in 1986, its market value was $780 million.  Microsoft’s market value would rise more than 700 times in the next 13 years.  Bill Gates made millionaires of thousands of ordinary public investors.  When Google went public in 2004 at a $23 billion valuation, it left less on the table for you and me.  Still, if you had invested in Google then and held your stock, you would be sitting atop a 9x return.  Zuckerberg and his Facebook friends took it all…”