As expected, Facebook just filed its initial public offering paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, marking the beginning of its process to become a publicly traded company. It'll trade under the stock symbol "FB" (although it didn't specify on what exchange) and says that it seeks to raise some $5 billion in the process. When the stock hits the open market, the company will be valued somewhere around $100 billion after you take into account the shares that existing investors already own.

Mark Zuckerberg himself has been revealed to own an astounding 28.4 percent of the company, which — if the $100 billion valuation is correct — would put his net worth near $30 billion. The filing notes that Zuck controls "a majority" of voting stock, which means he wields an extraordinary amount of power inside the company (not to say there was ever any doubt of that). He's got a base salary of $500,000, peanuts for a man who ranks as one of the wealthiest on the planet; COO Sheryl Sandberg clocks in at $300,000. As you can imagine, those figures don't tell the full story once you factor in stock benefits: Sandberg had total compensation last year of $30 million, Zuckerberg (a surprisingly low) $1.5 million. As of January of next year, Zuckerberg's annual salary will drop to just $1, a common practice among wealthy chief executives with a lot of skin in the game.

Now that these guys are going public, that means their earnings are public, too: the filing points to net income of $1 billion in 2011 on $3.7 billion revenue, up from $606 million in 2010. They're claiming some 845 million active monthly users, 483 million daily active users, and 100 billion friend connections — over 14 times the number of humans on the face of the planet. In the last quarter of 2011, the site averaged 250 million photo uploads per day; in December, it recorded 360 million people who logged in at least six out of seven days. Amazingly, a whopping 12 percent of Facebook's revenue presently comes from social gaming company Zynga alone, while mobile has yet to turn into a cash-making opportunity: "We currently do not show ads or directly generate any meaningful revenue from users accessing Facebook through our mobile products, but we believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users' mobile News Feeds," the filing says.