As expected, Facebook on Wednesday officially filed an initial public offering (IPO), raising $5 billion, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In its S-1 form, the social network said it would commence sale of stock to the public "as soon as practicable."
That document also revealed that the social network has been profitable for the past three years, bringing in revenue of $777 million in 2009, $1.974 billion in 2010, and $3.711 billion last year. It also has $3.908 billion in cash.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg's base 2011 salary was $500,000, and he received $220,500 as a first half of 2011 bonus, "which reflected the impact of his performance in leading our product development efforts, our success in growing Facebook's global user base and developing strong developer and commercial relationships," Facebook said.
As is common with many CEOs, earlier this year he agreed to drop his base salary to $1 per year, effective Jan. 1, 2013. But he has the option to purchase 120 million shares of Class B common stock.
The filing also revealed that Facebook now has 845 million users, gets 2.7 billion likes and comments per day, and 250 million photos uploaded per day.
Reports about a Facebook IPO have been making the rounds for months, but really got going on Friday after a Wall Street Journal report said it would happen sometime this week.
That followed November reports that said Facebook wanted to raise $10 billion in an IPO for a valuation of $100 billion.
During a November appearance on the Charlie Rose show, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said the idea behind going public is to be able to give back to those who invested in the company and helped it grow with their engineering talent.
"One of the ways you do that is to compensate people with equity and options," he said.
But Facebook will go public "when it makes sense," Zuckerberg said. "It's honestly not something I spend time thinking about on a day-to-day basis," he said.
An IPO was basically inevitable, however. U.S. securities regulations require companies with 500 or more shareholders to file financial reports with the SEC four months after the year they cross that threshold. Facebook hit that milestone last year, so it was going to have to disclose its financial information by April 2012.
Several tech companies have gone public in recent months, including Zynga, Yelp, Groupon, and LinkedIn, but none have been as large and influential as Facebook.
For more, see Before Facebook: A Look Back at Major Tech IPOs and Before Facebook: A Look Back at Major Tech IPOs, as well as the Facebook history slideshow above.