Who's to say the IPO will be successful? The suits will have to keep their shares for a bit, plenty of time for the whole mess to unfold. Plus, Groupon raised a ton of VC ($950M) after turning down Google's offer. Factoring in dilution, it won't take a drastically bad IPO to make $6B in-hand look like a steal.
Nope. Groupon was started by Andrew Mason and Eric Lefkofsky (who also put up the first money). Eric Lefkofsky through his investment shells^Wcompanies took more money out than anyone else.
Sure, but the founders (and the rest of the board) made the decision not to sell. You can call them fools, but they're laughing all the way to the bank.