NY Times: Hey, Mark Zuckerberg is Just Like Bill Gates!

For the first time ever in the history of the universe, someone has drawn a few parallels between the ascent of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and our own Bill Gates with Microsoft back in the day.

The New York Times' DealBook blog rehashes this oft-made comparison in a discussion of Facebook's likely IPO next year, despite Zuckerberg's desire to keep the company private:

A computer prodigy drops out of Harvard and builds one of America’s hottest companies. He brings on an M.B.A. to help him think about things other than programming. He wants to keep his very profitable company private. But as his company grows, he begins distributing shares to his ever-increasing employee base. This gives his company more than 499 shareholders and forces him to consider an initial public offering. The investment bank Goldman Sachs plays a major role in the I.P.O.

This isn’t Mark Zuckerberg in 2011. It’s Bill Gates in 1986.

GoldmanSachs has invested $450 million in Facebook, meaning it's likely to handle the company's insanely lucrative IPO whenever that happens.

Gates met with the Goldman team in 1986 and reportedly gave them the ringing endorsement of, "Well, they didn’t spill their food and they seemed like nice guys." What happened next is history:

On March 13, 1986, Microsoft had a hugely successful I.P.O. Priced at $21 a share, the stock spiked to $35.50 before closing at $27.75. The Microsoft chief financial officer called Seattle from the Goldman trading floor: “It’s wild! I’ve never seen anything like it — every last person here is trading Microsoft and nothing else.”

The I.P.O. put a $350 million value on Mr. Gates’s 45 percent stake, making him one of the wealthiest men in America at 30 years old.

The NY Times post essentially predicts the same mayhem when Facebook goes public--and gave us the excellent visual of a bunch of bankers wearing hoodies to suck up to Zuckerberg.

If you're not really a numbers person and need a little help understanding Facebook's financial dealings, Jon Stewart is here to help you out.