Mark Cuban Is Wrong: Facebook's Ebersman, Zuckberg and Thiel Were Short-Sighted

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Andrew Ross Sorkin set off a firestorm in the tech blogosphere/echo chamber earlier this week with his New York Times' DealBook column asserting that Facebook (FB) CFO, David Ebersman, was most responsible for Facebook's debacle of an IPO three months ago.

Well, the Facebook apologists have got their backs up on that one.

This creative Tumblr post took Sorkin's words and edited them to portray how brilliant Ebersman was.

Many folks on Twitter (and at TheStreet) said Ebersman was "not solely" to blame.

Others reminded us of the technical glitches of Nasdaq and how that caused the whole stock to get off on the wrong foot with investors "which cannot be quantified."

Then, Mark Cuban weighed in via WSJ's Marketbeat blog.

To blame Ebersman, Cuban says, is "180 degrees wrong."

He goes on to say:

Have you ever been to an auction where the selling party told a buyer to reduce their price because they were worried that the item might not hold its value? Neither have I. If the CFO of Facebook came on SharkTank and told me that he was able to sell his shares to the public for $38 a share, but turned down the opportunity, I would crush him for being an idiot.
Facebook was able to raise about 10 BILLION DOLLARS in this IPO. The CFO's job is not to manage shareholder portfolios. His job is to help Facebook succeed. I don't know about you, but putting 10 BILLION DOLLARS in the bank in my opinion is one way to help them succeed.

While Ebersman clearly was supposed to maximize the amount of money to be raked in by Facebook in the offering, he's clearly tainted the stock.

So what, you say? Mark Zuckerberg's got $10 billion in the bank. That's true but when's the next time they are going to do a secondary offering? Not anytime soon.

And that's really the key point here: Do you want to maximize Facebook's long-term interests or its short-term ones?