That's because Twitter's public stock valuation isn't only rich by historic standards. It's also pricey compared to those of Facebook and LinkedIn, its larger rivals in the market for social media ads sold on smartphones and tablets.
Twitter twice raised the price of its 70 million-share offering, to $26, giving it a market valuation of $18.3 billion, making it one of the largest tech IPOs in 10 years.
The professional investors who bought Twitter IPO shares are betting that the company's revenue will grow quickly, fueled by sales of mobile ads.
If that's true of most Twitter IPO buyers, the stock could surge on Thursday, driving the company's valuation even higher.
But if those buyers include enough hedge fund managers and other active traders intent on flipping the stock, the mania for Twitter shares might quickly cool.
LinkedIn and Facebook have price-to-sales ratios of 12-to-1, based on Wall Street's revenue estimates for next year.
Google, the largest seller of online advertising, is valued at about six times expected 2014 sales.
Twitter's investment bankers expect the company to post $950 million in 2014 sales, giving it a price-to-expected-sales ratio of 19 even before it starts trading.
In exchange, shareholders will get a chance to own some serious growth.
If Wall Street's projection is on the mark, Twitter's revenue will rise 53% next year.
That's faster than LinkedIn's expected growth of 42% and Facebook's, at 36%.
But unlike its two larger rivals, which are now generating operating income and net income consistently, Twitter isn't expected to be profitable this year.
In its most recent quarter, the San Francisco-based social media upstart saw its loss from operations triple from a year earlier to $63 million, even while revenue for the period doubled to $168.6 million, powered! by mobile ad sales.
Twitter is the latest of more than a dozen online companies that have been gone public during the last three years, a list that includes Groupon, Zynga, Zillow, Pandora Media, Yelp, OpenTable and Angie's List.
Thanks to this second Internet stock boom, when growth investors have gotten comfortable funding new business models, these companies are now worth more than $150 billion in combined market worth.
Twitter is now worth more than any of those save for LinkedIn and Facebook, and its shares are pricier than those of its larger social networking rivals, even though Twitter's business model has yet to produce any profits.
The company operates in a market that holds both tremendous opportunity and fierce competition.
Stock analysts who cover Facebook expect the company to report sales of $10.4 billion next year, up 36 percent from an average estimate of $7.6 billion for 2013.
Facebook is expected to sell more than $5 billion in mobile ads next year and has a current valuation of $120 billion.
In its most recent quarter, Facebook got almost half its ad revenue from mobile device users.
Twitter, meanwhile, said in its IPO filing "more than 70 percent" of its advertising revenue is mobile.
LinkedIn, which gets just under a quarter of its revenue from online ads -- both mobile and desktop -- and the rest from premium subscriptions, expects revenue to jump 42% next year to $2.2 billion.
At a valuation of $26.6 billion, LinkedIn is priced at 12 times expected sales.
That's pricey, even for a growth stock -- but not as expensive as Twitter.
John Shinal has covered tech and financial markets for 15 years at Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and others.
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