Twitter has done what it takes to become a public company, they’ve filed their paperwork with the Securities and Exchange commission. So now investors can buy and trade stock in the company.

It also means that would-be investors get the chance to learn more about the company and its goings-on from behind the curtain. One of the biggest findings was that Twitter isn’t making a profit as of yet.

After filing their S-1 document, the San Francisco company showed it brought in $253.6 million in revenue in the first six months of the year but their net loss increased quite a bit – 41% to $69.3 million bucks.

So what’s an S-1 and why did Twitter use it? It’s nicely answered in this article from Digital Trends.

Once all is said and done, the company will trade under the symbol TWTR, which is awfully similar to its original name for the company ‘twttr’.

Twitter has rolled out several monetizing campaigns like mobile advertising. And with 100 million users daily, Twitter should be able to grow monetarily over time especially while adding some more revenue channels.

Twitter announced that 500 million tweets are fired off each day. Those are solid numbers that investors will likely enjoy wrapping their heads (and wallets) around.

Twitter not profitable, but hope to raise a billion bucks

But Twitter needs to make money. And they sure are going to try to raise a bunch. The company announced they hope to raise a billion dollars through the IPO. Some analysts say that would value the company at $15 billion.

Twitter hopes to attract investors to help get them to a billion dollars. As for the current members of the ‘tweet team’, they’re seeing a decent pay day despite Twitter’s lack of profitability.

According to Mashable:

The big winner is Ev Williams, who owns 12% of Twitter. The biggest loser is Biz Stone, a company co-founder whose name does not appear anywhere in the company’s S-1.

Second on the compensation scale is Peter Fenton, who owns 6.7% of the company. Another co-founder, Jack Dorsey, who owns 4.9% of the company. Rounding out the list is CEO Dick Costolo, who owns 1.6% of Twitter.

Costolo also draws an annual salary of $200,000 but will get an additional $8.4 million in stock awards and $2.9 million in options for total of $11.5 million last year.

Adam Bain, Twitter’s chief revenue officer, meanwhile, also got $200,000 in salary plus stock and options worth $6.7 million last year, according to the filing. Christopher Fry, Twitter’s SVP of engineering, got $145,513 in salary plus a $100,000 bonus and stock awards worth $10 million.

Profitable or not, Twitter is bracing for the world of serious capital-raising, just what successful companies attempt during their initial IPO and the years to follow. It’s not always pretty (see Facebook’s foray into its offering). But over time, things seems to balance themselves out for most game-changing companies. This will be fun to watch, er, tweet about.

Image: Digital Trends