Twitter announced on September, 15th 2013, that they would trade with the New York Stock Exchange in New York, New York (Twitter wikipedia.com). .
Initially, Twitter planned to offer its shares at a $17-$20 range, though many analysts said this was low based on the internal price of the company's private shares, which was $20.62. The company spent a week touring the country, talking to potential investors. At the end of this week, because they saw more demand for their stock, they boosted the IPO range to $23-$25. But the NYSE said they could feasibly sell stock at $47. Issuing 70 million shares to sell, Twitter stated they would use all of the money gained for company purposes (Owens, Jeremy C). November 2013 came around and the big day finally arrived. However, it wasn't the company executives that rang the opening bell. Instead, popular actor and tweeter Patrick Stewart, young Vivienne Harr, who used her Twitter account to sell lemonade used the money towards stopping child slavery, and Boston Police Bureau Chief Cheryl Fiandaca, who kept the public informed by tweeting on the day of the Boston Marathon Bombing, all rang the bell ("Twitter Stock Soars"). At 9:30 am Eastern Time, when the bell was rung, the company's Twitter page tweeted '#Ring!' (Devaney, Tim). However, it wasn't till 10:49am Eastern Time, when the first trade was made. This was due to a backlog of orders the NYSE had to process (Demos, Telis, Chris Deiterich, and Yorkee Koh) (Devaney, Tim). Some investors had a bit of déjà vu concerning Facebook's IPO and feared the day would result in disaster, but soon those fears were put aside.
Even though Twitter settled on a starting price of $26, which valued the company at $18 billion, the stock opened at $45.10, which valued the company at $31 billion (Grove, Jennifer Van) (Twitter surges 73%). Trading under the symbol 'TWTR', the highest price reached was $50.
