For someone who says his business is not about making money, Mark Zuckerberg is about to make a few people very wealthy.

The Facebook founder himself is at the top of the list, followed by Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street banks that are managing Facebook's initial public offering. In the money, too, are a few well-connected investors, including clients of Goldman Sachs, who bought shares in private offerings.

The question now is whether public investors will find much to like in Facebook's shares. Scarcity value will probably drive up the price on its first day, but that will only benefit people who are well-connected enough to get an allocation of IPO shares.

Ordinary mortals must wait until after the stock begins trading, probably sometime this spring, and they should be wary of paying too much. Widespread reports indicate that Facebook will be valued as high as $100 billion, which is 27 times the company's revenue and 100 times its earnings.

On the plus side, revenue grew 88 percent last year. If Facebook could keep up that pace for a few years, the stratospheric price would begin to look reasonable.

Norm Conley, chief investment officer at JAG Advisors in Ladue, says he will take a serious look at Facebook once it's on the market.

"The cup-half-full approach would say Facebook is only generating $5 of revenue per user annually, and there's an awful lot of room to grow that," Conley says. "Maybe they're early in their monetarization efforts and they have plenty of room to grow."

Conley does, however, try to temper his enthusiasm for the recent crop of Internet IPOs. They don't have the potential that, say, Amazon had when it went public in 1997.

The Internet retailer raised just $54 million in its IPO, compared with the $5 billion that's being discussed for Facebook. Amazon's shares have soared 12,000 percent, but Facebook probably doesn't have the same upside. Public investors are buying in at a later stage and paying a much higher price.

"There's a huge difference between the last big IPO era in the late 1990s and this era," Conley says. "These companies are not going public until they're much more mature. A lot of what people used to think was the IPO upside is already gone."

Recent Internet IPOs have been a mixed bag. LinkedIn shares are 71 percent above last May's offering price, while Groupon and game maker Zynga have turned in more modest gains. Shares in Pandora, an Internet radio company, have fallen 17 percent since their June debut.

The lofty valuations assigned to companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have caused some people to worry about a new Internet bubble. Careful analysts, though, say that fear is overblown.

"This is just your typical hot IPO. They can come along in any environment," says Mark Keller, chief investment officer at Confluence Investment Management in Webster Groves.

In fact, Keller says, the market's recent sluggishness makes investors even more eager to hear a good growth story. "You throw a company like Facebook to a hungry crowd and they're all over it," he says.

So expect the shares to soar when they hit the market, making Zuckerberg and Goldman Sachs and other insiders even richer. Once the stock reaches those lofty heights, though, it's buyer beware. Facebook may have turned "friend" into a verb and "like" into a noun, but it hasn't yet rewritten the laws of finance.