They were Mark Zuckerberg’s cash cows.
Hordes of everyday New Yorkers played the fool yesterday to Wall Street fat cats and Facebook insiders, who used a bloated stock price to milk them of billions of dollars during an overhyped IPO.
With a $38-a-share price tag and forecasts for a 10 percent jump, mom-and-pop investors blindly bought in with dreams of instant riches that never came true.
Meanwhile, the social network’s hoodie-wearing CEO finished the day with a net worth of $19.25 billion. The average Facebook employee saw their on-paper wealth shoot up to $2.9 million.
Amid the IPO hoopla:
* A staggering 581 million shares traded hands, easily trumping the record of 458 million set by General Motors in 2010. In the first minute, 83 million shares crossed the tape.
* Because of Nasdaq computer glitches, individual investors were left in the dark for hours, wondering if their Facebook buy or sell orders had actually gone through.
* Zuckerberg’s Dobbs Ferry dentist dad got a $60 million payback for his initial investment in his son’s startup, but residents in the town were ready to “un-friend” the local boy wonder, saying he’s forgotten his roots.
nRock star Bono’s Elevation Partners finished the day with a staggering $1.4 billion in company stock after buying their shares for just $90 million in 2009.
* Real-estate brokers were courting Facebook millionaires — with one West Coaster ready to plunk down nearly $50 million for a swanky Manhattan pad.
At the Nasdaq in Manhattan, the crowd swelled to hundreds just minutes before the slated 11 a.m. trade start, snapping photos of the electronic screen that read: “FB Nasdaq Listed May 18, 2012.”
After a 30-minute delay, individual New York investors gobbled up stock online and at discount brokerage houses.
Queens chauffeur Thomas Gardner, whose home was just foreclosed on, could only afford $89 for two shares, which he hoped would eventually send his 9/11-born son to St. John’s University.
“This is a good start,” Thomas said, beaming as he came out of a Midtown Charles Schwab office. “Everybody is hoping for something, so I’m jumping on this wagon. I have a good feeling.”
Michael Scott, an Upper West Side architect, bought his shares on his iPhone.
“I like the chase,” said Scott, who bought Google stock at $100 a share in 2004 and still holds the $618 stock.
Retired nurse Teresa Ryan, who lives in Tudor City, bought 4,920 shares at $40.50, noting she made a killing on Apple stock.
“I’m very psychic when it comes to stocks, I really am,” said Ryan. “I have no retirement, I have no pension, so I try to make money on the market.”
Early in trading, Nasdaq had trouble sending electronic messages to brokers for retail investors, and the brokers couldn’t tell their clients if the trades had been executed, sources told Reuters.
The Nasdaq delay wound up “causing a lot of heartburn on the Street,” said one source. “We had to tell clients we didn’t get the print back,” said another.
The screw-up has caught the attention of Washington regulators.
Analysts said Facebook and its underwriters, Wall Street titans Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, got greedy in setting the offering price so high. Initially, the stock was set to hit the market at around $34 a share.
“They squeezed the lemon dry here,” said Dan Veru, chief investment officer at Palisade Capital Management. “They didn’t leave enough on the table.
“You want to price these things a little lower, so that the shares have better support in the aftermarket.”
“This is what happens when you price something around 100 times earnings,” said Barry Ritholtz, CEO of New York’s FusionIQ.
“There is nobody to blame but the company and the underwriters themselves.”
The inflated price didn’t affect the lucky inside buyers who got in ahead of yesterday’s IPO.
A San-Francisco-based investor has spent months planning how he’d live large on his windfall.
He flew to New York twice since January to scope out a $49.5 million, 30,000-square-foot TriBeCa trophy apartment, said Prudential Douglas Elliman broker Matt Gulker.
The anonymous buyer — who said he won’t have the dough for the purchase until he can cash out his Facebook holdings in six months — didn’t even care when the price on the eight-bedroom, 10-bath pad jumped $5 million.
Early Facebook faith also paid off yesterday for Zuckerberg’s dad, Edward, known as “Painless Dr. Z” to his Dobbs Ferry patients.
He got 2 million shares as a “thank you” for putting up seed money for his son’s startup back in 2004. He’s now $60 million richer.
But some folks in Zuckerberg’s hometown feel the boy wonder has yet to pay homage, or a penny, toward his old stomping grounds, even though he coughed $100 million for Newark’s schools.
“I don’t know of any major initiative that they helped fund. It’s awkward,” said Paul Feiner, who sits on the Westchester County Board of Legislators.
“He hasn’t done anything for us here at Dobbs Ferry,” said Darren Garofolo, 39, a construction worker who has lived in the town for 15 years.
“I use Facebook every day. So does everyone else I know.” he said. “So we are worth at least a little something to him. Why can’t he give back a little?”
“He should be proud of his roots, because in some way, we are all proud of him for what he achieved,” said Jason Steinberg, who attended Ardsley High School with Zuckerberg.
Additional reporting by Dan MacLeod, Natasha Velez and Liz Sadler