YCHART OF THE DAY: Facebook’s $75-100 Billion Market Cap on Just $6.3 Billion in Assets: Customers Create All the Value

Novo Nordisk Total Assets Chart by YCharts

Facebook, planning to go public with a market cap between $75 billion and $100 billion, has just $6.3 billion in assets on its balance sheet, and more than half of that is cash and short-term investments. In other words, Facebook cost next to nothing to build, and customers posting, liking and friending create all the value. Companies with market caps above $75 billion and the lowest-recorded asset levels: insulin maker Novo Nordisk (NVO); warehouse operator Amazon (AMZN); brewery owner AmBev (ABV); software maker SAP (SAP); franchisor McDonald’s (MCD). Through investment and acquisitions, they’ll piled up assets from roughly twice those of Facebook’s, to about six times as much. Much closer to Facebook was Google (GOOG), which had less than $10 billion in assets when it crossed the $100 billion-market-cap line in 2005.