Facebook’s IPO Shares May Be Five Times as Expensive as Google

Facebook Inc. may command a valuation more than five times higher than Google Inc. as it seeks to raise $5 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering of an Internet company.

The social-networking company, which filed for the IPO yesterday, may be valued at as much as $100 billion in the sale, two people with knowledge of the matter said last week. At that level, the company would trade at 26.9 times 2011 sales, compared with about 5 times for search-engine operator Google, whose market value has jumped eight-fold since its IPO.