Twitter announces IPO in a tweet

Twitter wants to go public and has filed an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company announced yesterday.

“We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale,” the company tweeted yesterday after the markets closed in New York and Toronto.

The news was re-tweeted and favourited thousands of times before the end of the day.

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The details of the IPO will be kept secret until the company starts trying to attract investors. Companies with less than $1 billion of revenue are allowed to keep their IPO confidential under U.S. law.

As a private company, Twitter has not said whether it’s profitable or what its revenues are. One estimate puts the company’s ad revenue at $582.8 million in 2013.

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The company was founded in San Francisco in 2006. It took two months and one day for the site to reach its billionth tweet. Now, its 200 million users send out a billion tweets every two and a half days.

Twitter has also recently announced plans to embed its employees into the workplaces of companies around the world to help with instant advertising.

With the SEC filing, the Twitter’s executives aren’t allowed to speak about the company or its financial situation.

A minute after the announcement, the company tweeted, “Now back to work.”

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