Facebook’s monthly rent is $1M+, and other gems from S-1 update

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook on Wednesday updated its S-1 document to the Securities and Exchange commission for its planned initial public offering, and it’s a veritable data dump of new information about the social networking company. The good news is, we’re digging through it so you don’t have to. Here are some of the more interesting tidbits disclosed in this latest regulatory filing:

The rent is really dang high.You think you spend a lot of money on rent? According to the new filing, Facebook’s new Menlo Park, Calif. campusis costing the company an average of well over $ 1 million per month for the next 14 years (the 15 year lease began in February 2011.) The company’s monthly rent will actually go up as time goes on, from $ 1.175 million/month now to $ 1.9 million/month in 2025, because ostensibly Facebook’s revenue will grow at the same time. The company is, however, getting a million square feet of space for that money, so in context it’s not that ridiculous.

Graph representing Facebook's property rent (click to enlarge)

Facebook controls even more of its data center strategy than you think. A couple years ago, rumors started buzzing about how a Delaware-based company called Vitesse was behind the planning of Facebook’s Prineville, Oregon data center. In 2011 Facebook eventually came clean with the details of all the ins and outs of the massive data center as part of its Open Compute Project, and now it’s totally clear that from day one it has been completely in charge of the effort: Vitesse is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Facebook, according to the newly filed S-1 documents.
Facebook wears the pants when it comes to Zynga.The updated filings included tons of information about Facebook’s relationship with Zynga, the social gaming giant. Even though Zynga has been asserting its own independence from Facebook, the details of the contract between the two companies shows that Zynga can never quite become a standalone business if it wants to maintain ties with the social media king. These clauses are especially key:

“All Zynga Users must have a valid (e.g. real; not suspended) FB account. Zynga will require all Zynga Users to connect their Zynga account to their FB account. In addition, Zynga will require all Zynga Users to be logged-in to their FB account with an active session to use or access any Covered Zynga Game, Zynga Mobile Game or any Zynga Property” [except in limited situations.]

and

“Zynga Users who are not Facebook Users must create a FB account.”

and

“Zynga may not prompt any users on the Facebook Site to create, log-in with, register for or otherwise use Zynga Credentials on the Facebook Site.”

Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, and the other execs have it pretty good. Of course, you already knew this. But the new S-1 shines a bit more light on the compensation packages of Facebook’s executive team. Mark Zuckerberg’s base salary for 2012 is $ 500,000 (which was shown in the initial S-1) and the new filing shows he is eligible for a semi-annual bonus of 45 percent of that salary based on his performance; COO Sheryl Sandberg’s salary is $ 300,000 and she is also up for the 45 percent twice yearly bonus. They each get 21 days paid vacation annually (this is on par with the rest of Facebook’s employees.)

We’ll continue to pore over the documents and will update this story with any more gems we come across. And keep checking in at GigaOM for our full Facebook IPO coverage.

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