Word: ipos
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Skoll is no novice to philanthropy or quixotic causes. As eBay's first president, he created the eBay Foundation with a donation of 107,250 shares of pre-ipo stock to fund community organizations and provide grants to a variety of non-profit groups. His $600 million Skoll Foundation awards up to 18 grants each year, ranging from $500,000 to $1 million, to midlevel social entrepreneurs. But when Skoll opened Participant Productions in January 2004 and announced his intention to cure what ails the world through film, even his greatest admirers predicted the billionaire would soon be downsizing...
Flush with success--and with profit margins of 60%--the firm went public on the London Stock Exchange this summer. The June 27 IPO, which valued PartyPoker at $10 billion, was Britain's biggest this year. Bhargava shared the pot with two other reclusive co-owners: a Net pornographer named Ruth Parasol, who switched from carnality to cards in the late 1990s, and Anurag Dikshit, an Indian software whiz whom Bhargava met when both were students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. They are not three of a kind, but they did cash out about one-fifth...
...legislators and traditional casino companies. Poker is growing most rapidly; this year an estimated $2.7 billion will be spent on Internet poker games, almost double last year's take and 10 times that of 2002. That breakneck growth can't continue--one reason PartyGaming's stock drifted below its IPO price--but other casino games like blackjack, as well as lotteries and sports betting, are finding new homes online. According to Warwick Bartlett, who runs the British firm Global Betting & Gaming Consultants, almost $12 billion will be wagered over the Internet this year, or close to 5% of the world...
...Empire Online, and are mainly based in exotic, low-tax jurisdictions such as Gibraltar, Malta or Canada's Kahnawakee Mohawk Indian reservation. Says Richard Segal, an experienced British casino executive who joined PartyGaming as CEO last year and sold more than $15 million worth of stock in the June IPO: "It's like bees around the honeypot...
Lawyers for online firms, especially those seeking to reassure potential investors before an IPO, cite such cases as critical precedents. Not all are convinced: one of Wall Street's leading law firms, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, recently warned investment-banking clients to steer clear of online-gaming companies because of concerns about their legality in the U.S. Should the DOJ decide to crack down, the gaming firms, at least, have an exit. PartyGaming's prospectus takes pains to point out that the company has no tangible assets or physical presence in the U.S. Indeed, one reason co-founder Parasol...