Facebook Should Put Zynga Out of Business Immediately

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- As a Facebook (FB) long, I just want to see Zynga (ZNGA) go away.

The idea that Facebook or Amazon.com (AMZN) should buy Zynga stinks of surface-scratch thinking from people who couldn't come up with an original idea to save their virtual farms or frontiers. In fact, Facebook, Amazon and any other company even loosely related to the new media space should do everything in their power to stomp out Zynga.

Zynga is bad for business. Zynga gives tech, startup culture and employee stock options a bad name. Zynga gives people who perpetuate the lame 'Web 2.0 Bubble' meme firepower.

Of course, Facebook drops in what we like to call "sympathy" every time Zynga announces what an inept company it is. That happened Friday when Mark Pincus's operation lowered expectations again and saw its stock crash by as much as 22%.

If regulatory agencies, teams and leagues require athletes to undergo random drug testing, there's no reason why we shouldn't subject corporate CEOs to the same type of scrutiny.

I have no issue at all with people getting rich. Most of the people I know or follow closely in the tech space appear to deserve every penny of it. They work hard. They innovate. They strive to change the world. Some actually do. I don't even have a problem with Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings getting fat, as he did prior to Netflix's crash, on stock options.

Insider selling of stock is a way of life, particularly in Silicon Valley. That's how executives and, increasingly, the rank-and-file get paid. I would cash in options as early and as often as I could regardless of how well the company I worked for was doing. Like any other investor, folks with options need to secure their futures and diversify.

That said, somebody -- like maybe the SEC (!) -- needs to step in at least occasionally to, at the very least, ask some questions.

As Business Insider nicely details, the institutions and individuals who sold ZNGA for $12 a share into the company's April secondary offering likely didn't do anything wrong.

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