Twitter follows the money: all the latest news on the IPO

The New York Stock Exchange played host to Twitter's high-profile initial public offering this morning as the company went public and shares began trading on the market. Twitter's soaring bird logo was emblazoned across both the outside and the inside of the exchange, and in such context the logo fittingly illustrated the company's hopes for its publicly traded stock.

Many were on the floor of the exchange well before the 9:30AM opening bell, and anticipation rose as the market prepared to open. Twitter executives on hand — including CEO Dick Costolo, CFO Mike Gupta, and co-founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone — surprisingly didn't partake in the ceremonies, instead opting to make their appearance right on the exchange floor. A group of Twitter users took the podium instead, led by Sir Patrick Stewart.

Twitter held its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange this morning, opening its stock up for purchase to any interested investor, and as it turns out, there were many. Shortly after trading began around 9:30 AM ET, Twitter's share price rocketed well past the $26 per share minimum the company set last night, opening up 74 percent at $45.10 to start the day. It finished the day right around the same spot, at $44.90.

Twitter will begin selling shares of its stock at $26 per share, the company said Wednesday, which is in the range that had been expected. The company will offer 70 million shares of its common stock, along with another 10.5 million that will be sold to its underwriters. The offering is expected to raise $1.8 billion. The shares are scheduled to go on sale tomorrow under the symbol TWTR.

In its latest update to its S-1 filing, Twitter announced that it will be raising the price range for its public offering from $17-20 up to $23-25. That would allow Twitter to raise around $1.75 billion and value the company around $14 billion, up from $10.9 billion. The upgrade indicates that Twitter found strong demand during its investor roadshow, but it has also been conservative all along about its pricing, and many analysts expected this move. The company still has a little time to fine tune its offering, and is expected to finalize the price on Wednesday and go live Thursday morning.

As Twitter gets closer to its initial public offering (IPO), more and more details are leaking out, and now we know exactly how many shares will be available when the company hits the market. According to a new document filed with the SEC, Twitter will offer 70 million shares and expects to price them between $17 and $20. That's a good bit less than Facebook hit the market at — but given the wild ride that its stock went on over the following year, Twitter's more conservative pricing might be to the benefit of potential investors. Though, as noted by Bloomberg, Twitter's average revenue per user is less than half of Facebook's, and the company has a significantly smaller userbase than Facebook as well.

There's also an option to purchase another 10,500,000 shares depending on whether or not Twitter's underwriters decide to pick up their option. Just using the 70 million stocks as a baseline, Twitter's IPO could raise $1.4 billion using its upper price target. With the number of shares and a target price set, the company should make its debut on the New York Stock Exchange before too long, though there isn't a public target date just yet.

Two weeks after Twitter filed the paperwork for a planned billion-dollar IPO, we learn that it's poised to take advantage of the same international tax loopholes as other large firms like Apple, Google, and Amazon. Citing Twitter Ireland documents, Valleywag reports that the company has all the requisite parts for the "Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich" — a scheme that can minimize a company’s tax exposure by enabling it to lease its intellectual property to foreign subsidiaries. The idea is to turn foreign profits into tax-free revenues, and everything from the existence of Irish shell companies to their Cayman Islands home base give ample insight into Twitter’s strategy.

Valleywag quotes a corporate tax attorney who stressed the idea of getting the plan in place early. "The key to these structures is that you have to set them up when you are creating the [intellectual property]… it makes sense that [Twitter has] the structure in place up front," they explained.

As Twitter continues to move closer to its IPO, more details of its plans are becoming clear — today, an S-1 form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Twitter will list on the New York Stock Exchange. That confirms a rumor from a few weeks ago that said the company was expected to choose the NYSE over Nasdaq, where Facebook is traded. Nasdaq suffered a number of difficulties in the days following the Facebook IPO, a time of trouble that eventually led to a $10 million settlement with the SEC. Scott Cutler from the NYSE called it a "decisive win" and said his organization was "grateful for Twitter's confidence in our platform."

The updated S-1 form also gave some new details on the company's financial performance — through September 30th of this year, Twitter took in $422.2 million in revenue. That's up 106 percent from revenue in the first nine months of 2012. However, the company's net loss also increased — the $133.9 million loss is 89 percent over the first nine months of 2012. As for monthly active users, they're up as well. At the end of September, the company touted 232 million active users, up from 218 million at the end of June. Unsurprisingly, mobile continues to be the company's biggest source of advertising revenue — 70 percent of it comes from mobile, up from 65 percent last quarter.

Twitter may be the only technology stock people have been hearing about on the nightly news recently, but it’s actually just the most prominent among a crowd of startup IPOs to hit the markets in the last year. In a single week this September, 13 tech companies went public: everything from Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI), a provider of fiber-optic networking products, which raised around $36 million, to Covisint (COVS), which built a data-sharing platform used by companies in the auto and healthcare industries, and which raised $81 million. Both companies had shown steady losses before going public.

"In the last decade, most companies doing under a billion dollars in revenue couldn’t attempt an IPO," says Alan Patricof, the founder of Greycroft Partners and a veteran tech investor. "So 90 percent of successful startups were eventually acquired by one of the tech giants." In the last year this has changed dramatically, as the broader stock market has come roaring back. "There is a new appetite for young companies." For the first time since 2007, more than 200 companies will likely go public this year. Like Twitter, many are not yet profitable, but they have one thing going for them that wealthy investors are after: growth.

Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, a consumer electronics retailer that declared bankruptcy in 2007, saw its share price balloon on Friday thanks to confused traders who thought they were buying into the newly announced stock offering from Twitter. Of course, Twitter shares aren't yet available for public purchase, but that didn't halt millions of transactions in the moribund Tweeter stock, which trades under the initialism TWTRQ, close but not the same as Twitter's upcoming TWTR ticker. Trading in Tweeter shares was halted upon realization of the mass confusion, though not before the price reached a high of 15 times its typical valuation of a single cent.

Twitter has filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to become a public company, which will allow outside investors to buy and trade stock in the company in the coming months. The San Francisco company will trade under the symbol TWTR when it goes public, it revealed in the S-1 document it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The S-1, which was made public today, said that Twitter has 215 million monthly active users but is not yet profitable. During the first six months of 2013 the company pulled in $253.6 million in revenue, but its net loss increased by 41 percent to $69.3 million.

There are two interesting numbers which will likely work in Twitter's favor. Only one third of its users are currently in the US, meaning it has plenty of room to grow at home. And 65 percent of its revenue comes from mobile advertising, besting its rivals like Facebook and LinkedIn. It can't boast big profits, as Facebook did when pitching its IPO. But Twitter does have a huge daily audience: 100 million people use the service every day.

But that distinction may be something that Twitter's looking for. Facebook's opening on the stock market was notoriously troubled, and it took over a year before the social network's stock returned to its initial price.

Twitter's choice of the New York Stock Exchange may well be the safer selection for the moment too. Nasdaq — which Facebook chose to list on — has been home to a number of high-profile technical issues over the last several months, including a three-hour shutdown last month over connectivity issues, and shortly thereafter, another, smaller failure of a related data feed. Nasdaq's troubled Facebook opening last year also led to it handing $10 million over to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a settlement, and it's been seeing more and more tech companies choose its competitor of late.

Twitter is a company full of contradictions. The service is unavoidable in daily life, mentioned prominently by radio DJs, TV news anchors, pop celebrities, and star athletes. At the same time, the company is perceived as too confusing for the mainstream user, and with less than 300 million users, seen as relatively small when compared to Facebook’s 1 billion. As it prepares for its initial public offering, there will be a chorus of voices expressing optimism and doubt about Twitter's business prospects. Below is a collection of the crucial facts and salient arguments you can expect to hear.

Seven years ago, as the podcasting startup that he worked at was flailing, Jack Dorsey decided to try a side project: Twitter. Today the company is preparing for an initial public offering of its stock, bringing it a higher profile, a significant cash hoard, and more time to realize its vision as a global, real-time news and entertainment network. Going public also brings the specter of quarterly earnings, shareholder pressure, and activist investors. To see what those can do to a company, look no further than Facebook — another unproven social network that spent a year sweating as it worked to persuade investors of its long-term value.

The IPO is expected to arrive sometime in the next few months. After the new millionaires are minted, and more fully vested early employees head for the exits, what will Twitter look like for those who don’t hold a financial stake in the company? The company declined to comment. But in the past several months, Twitter has already started to transform, rolling out fundamental changes to its core experience that will shape the product for years to come. Interviews with analysts and others familiar with the company’s thinking suggest that those changes will only accelerate in the months leading up to and following its public debut.