After chuckling over the pre-IPO rumour that Facebook was developing its own integrated circuit design, I just can't help talking about the Facebook IPO stumble. Even at today's close of $31.00, the company's market valuation puts it a long way off from not actually being able to fund IC development. But how long would Facebook stock have to tumble before the cheques could no longer be written?

At this level, putting numbers to the calculation might be patently artificial, but let's proceed anyway. The NY Times once speculated Apple's chip design costs were $1B, but let's go with the even less specific several hundred million. As it stands, Facebook is still "worth" $66B. As far as market cap goes, it still would have to fall a healthy factor of 10 or more. As one of my favourite university professors often said, "What's an order of magnitude between friends?"

I don't think there are too many market analysts predicting a fall below $10 per share. If it does, though, that order of magnitude is going to lose Mark Zuckerberg a lot of friends.