The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook will begin pitching its stock to investors starting Monday of next week, and should the social network be successful in obtaining interest, it will hold its initial public offering on May 18th. Apparently, that date isn't set in stone, as the publication's anonymous sources say Facebook might push things back a day or two either way, but it looks like the company is seeking to raise that cash sooner rather than later. Facebook originally filed for IPO on February 1st, saying that it intended to raise at least $5 billion, and make the company worth a total of $100 billion as a result, though similarly anonymous sources have suggested Facebook could raise as much as $10 billion if things go well.

Thanks to the company going public, we've learned a lot more about how the company does business that was previously behind closed doors: for instance, Facebook has 900 million active users, gets twelve percent of its business from Zynga, stores more than 100 petabytes of photos and video, and Mark Zuckerberg not only personally owns 28.4 percent of the company, but controls a majority of voting stock, too. If eager stock buyers do drive the value of Facebook above $100 billion in late May, he'll be worth about $30 billion at the end of trading.