The $4 Billion Blog Post

Proving either how powerful blogging has become in the marketplace, or how fragile tech stocks are, John Mahoney’s post on PopSci sez,

For anyone still doubting the power of blogs and bloggers to effect change in the real world, take a look at this: Yesterday morning, Engadget.com reported on what it believed to be a legitimate internal e-mail from Apple that stated that the hotly anticipated iPhone would miss its slated June release and be delayed until October. Additionally, the e-mail said, the next version of Apple’s OS X operating system would also be delayed, until next January.
Now, the interesting part: Almost instantly (seven minutes, to be exact) after the Engadget announcement hit, at around noon EST, Apple’s stock price tumbled by over $4.50 in a massive sell-off (the drop took only an additional six minutes). That amount might not seem like much for a stock valued at around $107 at the start of trading today, but applied to the full volume of shares on the market, the drop represents a market-capitalization loss of just over $4 billion. In the blink of an eye, a lot of people (Steve Jobs more so than anyone) lost a lot of money. All from a blog post.

Link (with updates; their via). (thanks, Thomas!)

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2 comments on “The $4 Billion Blog Post
  1. I believe this one applies “Unless each man prodiuses more than he receives, increases his output, there will be less for him than all the others”, doesn’t it?

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