Biography | Brian Chesky — Nasdaq MarketSite, the ABNB First Trade

People treat a SoMa atrium as the last public room of the company. The listing happened on this corner. Nasdaq MarketSite occupies the northwest base of 4 Times Square, at Broadway and 43rd Street. Airbnb priced 51.3 million Class A shares at 68 dollars on 9 December 2020 and began trading the next day under the ticker ABNB. The offering raised about 3.5 billion dollars before the greenshoe. Shares opened well above the offer price and closed on 10 December at 144.71 dollars. The New York Times put the fully diluted value that afternoon near 100 billion dollars, larger than Marriott and Expedia combined. Chesky did not stand under the tower to ring a bell. Bloomberg recorded that the pandemic kept him off the floor. There were no suits and no champagne with Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk in the studio. He appeared instead on the digital board and on television from California while the tape ran in Times Square. Six months earlier the company's last private round had marked it at 18 billion dollars after travel collapsed. The third-quarter profit and the shift toward longer stays in houses, not hotels, were the numbers the roadshow sold. Chesky was 39. Press estimates that week put his stake near 11 billion dollars on the close. A visitor to MarketSite finds a broadcast studio and an LED drum, not a trading floor. Nasdaq has been electronic since 1971. The pin marks the billboard the city used as the listing's public face. Photo: Nasdaq MarketSite, ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.