Balance sheet, Net Increase
The changes to Equity given are: Since the total change is 42,500, the difference would be change in Retained Earnings (net income), so net income is
i cannot directly tell from the provided information if it is already included in Net A/R but if there is a balance sheet you can check yourself if the Total Cash Flow matches the difference between cash position year 0&amp;1 and see if it is net or still to be included. However what actually appears to happen is that the 100k is invested into the company to fund some growth plan. So is it actually the case that E's company is worth 400k only AFTER the transaction? Is the 100k added to the balance sheet as cash and would the other 300k be listed as an IP asset? The investor gets 25% of the shares of the company and pays $100k for them, so Owner's Equity increases by $100k, and the company gets $100k more in cash. The $400k number is an implicit calculation: if 25% of the company is worth $100k, 100% of the company is worth $400k. It's not on the books: the investor is just commenting that they feel that they are being over-charged. "The basic equation taught in day one of accounting school is that Assets = Liabilities + Equity. My first point was that I looked at the actual financial statements published as of the end of the 2nd quarter 2017, and the total liabilities on their audited balance sheet were like $13 billion, not $20b. I don't know where the author got their numbers from.  My second point: Debt usually needs to be paid on prearranged terms agreed upon by the debtor and the debtee, including interest, so it is important for a business to keep track of what they owe and to whom, so they can make timely payments. As long as they have the cash on hand to make payments plus whatever interest they owe, and the owners are happy with the total return on their investment, then it doesn't really matter how debt they have on the balance sheet.  Remember the equation A=L+E. There are precisely two ways to finance a business that wants to acquire assets: liabilities and/or equity. The ""appropriate"" level of debt vs equity on a balance sheet varies wildly, and totally depends on the industry, size of the business, cash flow, personal preferences of the CEO, CFO, shareholders et al, etc.    It gets way more detailed and complicated than that obviously, but the point is that looking at debt alone is a meaningless metric. This is corporate finance and accounting 101, so you can probably find tons of great articles and videos if you want to learn more." "If a company earns $1 Million in net profit (let's say all cash, which is not entirely realistic), it can do one of three things with it: On the balance sheet - profits that have not been distributed show up as ""retained earnings"".  When dividends are paid, Retained Earnings and cash are reduced. None of the other options change the fact that it is still ""profit"" - they all just affect the balance sheet, not the income statement: Note that when a company issues dividends, it reduces its per-share value since cash is leaving the door with nothing in return.   In Apple's case, since a significant amount of its profit was earned in other countries (where it was not taxed by the US), it would pay a significant amount in US corporate tax by bringing it back to the US by investing it or paying dividends. They are betting that at some point, the US will change the rules to make it more favorable to ""repatriate"" the money and reduce their tax significantly." Even assuming you were reading the balance sheet correctly it means nothing. What banks mostly care about is cash flow.  Do they have enough extra money to make the payments on whatever they borrow? I have never had a credit card company ask me about assets--they don't care.  They care about income with which to pay the credit card bill. Have a solid record of paying your bills and enough income to pay back what you are trying to borrow and you'll have an excellent credit rating no matter what your net worth.  Whether you are one person or a megacorporation makes no difference. "When I look at debt I try to think of myself as a corporation.  In life, you have a series of projects that you can undertake which may yield a positive net present value (for simplicity, let's define positive net present value as a project that yields more benefit than its cost). Let's say that one of the projects that you have is to build a factory to make clothing.  The factory will cost 1 million dollars and will generate revenue of 1.5 million dollars over the next year, afterwhich it wears out. Although you have the knowledge to build this wonderful factory, you don't have a million bucks laying around, so instead, you go borrow it from the bank.  The bank charges you 10% interest on the loan, which means that at the end of the year, the project has yielded a return of 400k. This is an extremely simplified example of what you call ""good"" debt.  It is good if you are taking the debt and purchasing something with a positive value. In reality, this should be how people should approach all purchases, even if they are with cash.  Everything that you buy is an investment in yourself - even entertainment and luxury items all could be seen as an investment in your happiness and relaxation.  If more people approached their finances in this way, people would have much more money to spend, William" The most likely answer to your question regarding what the 'market expects' is perhaps that the market expects that currently Linked-In like a lot of other startups has been plunging almost eveything it makes into building the business and brand.  So right now the net profits are pretty low percentage of income (roughly 1.5% of revenue)  Given the size of the other numbers, it doesn't take a lot of movement in the right direction to get a big change in that tiny final number.  The other factor is the gap between their Net and the Income Available..  I think (but I'm making a logical guess here) a large part of that gap was paying off the losses of the prior two years.  If that's the case, and everything else is static, then next year's 'available' number ought to at least triple.  In order to grow the net, all LI needs is to either continue current trends of growth in expenses relative to costs,  keep expenses steady and experience a slight growth in income, or find a way to reduce expenses without having it impact income. Or something in between those three.   If we take the first case as an example, income has been roughly doubling every year, but expenses growing less than that.  if they were to continue that, but manage to get some economy of scale and have expenses grow at a slower rate, then the jump in net income ought to be substantial. most of the trends you could project end up with a big growth in the bottom line.. but yeah I gotta admit, none of that gets you 117X growth in a single year.  So the conclusion I would draw is that the market is trending a few years out and being pretty optimistic given the current PE ratio.  Of course you could also conclude that the market is 'social network happy' and LNKD represents one of the few opportunities for the average investor to get in on that given that facebook and myspace are not trading on the open market This is a tough question SFun28.  Let's try and debug the metric. First, let's expand upon the notion share price is determined in an efficient market where prospective buyers and sellers have access to info on an enterprises' cash balance and they may weigh that into their decision making.  Therefore, a desirable/undesirable cash balance may raise or lower the share price, to what extent, we do not know.   We must ask How significant is cash/debt balance in determining the market price of a stock?   As you noted, we have limited info, which may decrease the weight of these account balances in our decision process. Using a materiality level of 5% of net income of operations, cash/debt may be immaterial or not considered by an investor. investors oftentimes interpret the same information differently (e.g. Microsoft's large cash balance may show they no longer have innovative ideas worth investing in, or they are well positioned to acquire innovative companies, or weather a contraction in the sector) My guess is a math mind would ignore the affect of account balances on the equity portion of the enterprise value calculation because it may not be a factor, or because the affect is subjective.