I think the Google IPO was a bit unique where they kind of gave Wall Street the finger and said "we'll do it our way, thanks". They pissed off a lot of bankers but I don't think Sergey and Larry really cared.

Haven't seen a situation or company like that since.

I have no actual idea, but I saw a comment the other day to the effect that:

Choosing a good price is a) hard, because of the due diligence, and b) expensive, because if you chose wrongly, you lose money (in an auction, this is called the winner's curse.) So the cost of estimating the price before the shares are on the market needs to be priced in to the initial sale price.

Probably doesn't explain a 100% jump though, but in regard to the rich supposedly supporting free markets, I will remark that people's ability to be for things when they are applied to other people, and against them when applied to themselves, never ceases to amaze me.

Google's auction didn't work, they marginalized wall st. and the banks ended up rigging the bidding. While it only popped 20% on opening day, the stock was up 4x in a matter of months.

When you say "didn't work", what do you mean? "Rigging the bidding" sounds like a big deal - where is this covered?

I don't really know these things but as far as I can tell what Google did was something really unpopular that only what Google used to be could do: they only allowed the "right" VCs to invest to their conditions, and they were not interested to the reaction of bankers and alike, and everybody wanted the Google shares. Twitter was nowhere in such a kind of predominant position given that is in a weaker situation (it is not clear if it will ever make enough money to justify even the IPO initial price).

Because it works MUCH better. Google could have made much more money on its IPO if it used a sales team.