Twitter shares priced at $26

Twitter’s shares have been priced at $26 each, valuing the company at more than $14 billion when it starts selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday.

Twitter’s entry into the stock market is to become the largest Silicon Valley offering since Facebook’s listing in 2012. Though the social networking site has never made a profit, since 2010 its revenue has grown more than tenfold, now at $317 million.

Currently boasting 230 million users across the globe, Twitter had originally estimated shares at $17-$20, however earlier this week that was upped to $23-$25.

“Twitter’s scale is big enough and (critically) unique enough to have sufficient scale to be a big business, if one that is unlikely to ever match Facebook’s ultimate size,” Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research wrote in a note to investors.

“We can envision the stock moving past our price target quite rapidly, although how high is ‘up’ will be a function of the vagaries of demand in the market compounded by what we think will be positive operating momentum in the near-term.”

However, Wieser also says that we should expect that the stock will inevitably face some downward pressure at some point – “whether because of sales due to lock-up expirations (which should occur in both February and May of next year), because of short-term missteps by the company (perceived or actual), competitive actions by competitors or because user trends fail to meet investor expectations.”