• Facebook is borrowing money. Actually, no. Facebook's $100 million is a lease, not a loan. Facebook is on the hook for rent payments, and will have the option to buy the equipment at the end of the lease. But technically, it's not on the hook for the $100 million. That said, it's hard to imagine how, at the end of the lease, Facebook functions without the servers it's renting. What Facebook is doing with the lease is delaying the day it has to buy its servers outright.
• Facebook is borrowing money because it can't sell its equity. Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider put forward this theory. In moments like these, one wonders less why the former stock analyst was barred from the securities industry. A venture lease like Facebook's usually requires an "equity kicker" — warrants to purchase stock, the corporate version of the stock options employees get. In this case, Facebook negotiated a warrant-free deal, but it's given TriplePoint warrants in the past. So Facebook's lender, TriplePoint, is betting that Facebook's equity is worth something; it wouldn't have offered it leases in the past otherwise. A warrant-free deal may not be great for TriplePoint, but it's great for Facebook.
• Facebook won't know what to do with all those servers. This is the most nonsensical theory of all. Facebook isn't renting servers for the workaday business of displaying webpages and photos. While it needs some more servers to keep up with site growth, the main reason it needs so many servers, I believe, is that it's planning to use them on the massive job of analyzing data to target advertising and content to its users.
• Gideon Yu must be an idiot. We've ribbed Yu for being a bit slick. But as YouTube's CFO, Yu negotiated the company's sale to Google for $1.65 billion. Shall we not give him some small amount of credit for knowing what he's doing?

And as for that bromide about tech companies not incurring debt? In the form of leases, they do it all the time, from landlords and hardware makers. Even startups lease their offices, and IBM, HP, Dell, Sun and others have large financing arms that help put equipment in customers' hands without money upfront. Save for the size of this deal and the name of the renter, TriplePoint's lease would have been wholly unremarkable.

There is one question that remains: How TriplePoint will come up with the money. This is reportedly the largest deal the lender has ever financed. Let's take TriplePoint at its word, though. The company's website says it has says it has "the capacity to put more than $1.5 billion to work" — curiously hedged wording. Note that TriplePoint doesn't actually say it has $1.5 billion on hand to lend. But that's TriplePoint's problem, not Facebook's.

Because Zuckerberg doesn't have to. Microsoft owns 1.6 percent of Facebook; Li, even after doubling his take, only 0.8 percent. Neither stake is large enough to merit a board seat. Andreessen is, like Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, an entrepreneur-friendly choice; he bypassed Sand Hill Road altogether to raise Ning's $100-million-plus in funding.

Just yesterday, we'd heard that Zuckerberg, who owns 27 percent of Facebook, had the right to appoint two board members. That leaves him one more seat at the table to fill. Anyone want to take odds on the moneymen getting left out once again?

No, the problem for Facebook is the appearance of a well-funded competitor in a market Facebook has yet to crack. Entering the China market is a key reason why Facebook took money from Hong Kong telecom mogul Li Ka-Shing. (Ironically, Accel Partners, an early backer of Facebook, also invested in Oak Pacific.)

It would be foolish for Facebook to go out and raise more money simply to match Xiaonei's bankroll; equally foolish to entertain thoughts of buying the company at such a high valuation. No, Facebook's only reasonable choice here is to redouble its efforts to expand into the Chinese market. Engineers who speak Mandarin but have been rebuffed on previous attempts to get into Facebook might find its recruiters more hospitable now.

CAN YOU PLEASE HELP US GET IN CONTACT WITH OWNE VAN NATT TO OFFER HIM TO TAKE THE HELM OF PWNED.COM, AND GET GREAT $ TO REPEAT WHAT HE DID WITH FACEBOOK

Then, two minutes later, Leach sent us this email:

One is former COO Owen Van Natta, who won the right to sell shares as part of his departure from the company. The others, we're told, are a handful of "hardship cases." Zuckerberg has said an IPO won't come until 2009 at the earliest; in the meantime, he's resisting efforts to create a free market in its still-private shares. To my mind, the persistent rumors — apparently untrue — that Zuckerberg himself has sold shares just show how eager his underlings are to cash out.

There's certainly nothing confused about Li's business sense. He runs Cheung Kong Holdings and Hutchison Whampoa, a worldwide conglomerate with 250,000 employees. As well, Li has ties to Tom.com, the online Chinese portal, a connection that could help Facebook's entry into the world's second-largest Internet market. As for Facebook, word is that it's still looking for more cash — besides the $300 million it has raised so far, the board has authorized another $200 million — but that some potential investors such as Providence Equity Partners walked away from discussions due to Facebook's unwieldy terms.