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Give people a little money, and you'll gain their loyalty.  Give 'em too much, and they may retire and forget you.  So Facebook seems to be making a wise move by allowing employees to sell a small number of their stock options.

Eric Eldon reports, "Facebook has an internal valuation of $4 billion . . . .  It will begin letting current employees sell 20 percent of their fully vested stock options at that valuation, starting this fall, I've learned from well-connected sources."

 

Onlookers and Facebook employees can probably rule out any near-term acquisitions or IPOs as a result.  More evidence on that front: there haven't been many recent rumors about those possibilities, and market conditions more or less suck.

Yet to return to the issue of loyalty, this development should go a ways towards satisfying the main reason an employee would push for one of those outcomes.  Cash from one source or another is all the same in the end.

Oh, and in case you realized the figure $4 billion doesn't match something we've seen connected to Microsoft, Eldon states, "[T]o be clear the internal valuation applies to common stock. . . .  [T]he company values its common stock at $4 billion but also values its preferred stock at $15 billion.  The reason for the $15 billion preferred-stock valuation is that preferred stock holders have certain rights, including the right to sell their stock first and get their invested money back before common stockholders are allowed to sell any stock."

This development also seems to signal, then, that Steve Ballmer isn't having any significant second thoughts about his investment.