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Facebook to Buy WhatsApp for 16 Billion

posted by Dopefish on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the when-will-this-darn-bubble-pop-already? dept.

lubricus writes "Facebook announced plans to acquire WhatsApp for four billion cash, plus 12 billion in Facebook shares.

Additionally, WhatsApp employees and founders will receive three billion in restricted stock which will vest in four years. Facebook also agreed to a one billion dollar break up fee.

WhatsApp says they have message volume which approaches the global SMS volume, and hope to have one billion users. Even at those figures, Facebook is paying $16 per user.

I'm guessing WhatsApp will send Snapchat developers a cake."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by TheloniousToady on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:33PM

    by TheloniousToady (820) on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:33PM (#3623)
    If this is part of a bubble, maybe Facebook should pay in Bitcoin instead of real money. ;-) But seriously, Folks, Ars has a very nice article about this [arstechnica.com] that (spoiler alert) ends with:

    On being acquired by a large company

    (quoted before the Facebook acquisition) Jan Koum says: "We worked in a large company and we weren't that happy. Facebook Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent they were able to build a great company. That's how we think about it." Brian Acton adds: "I worry about what [an acquiring] company would do with our population: we've made such an important promise to our users - no ads, no gimmicks, no games - that to have someone come along and buy us seems awfully unethical. It goes against my personal integrity."

    It seems that the core values of "no ads, no gimmicks, no games" that apparently made WhatsApp so successful are the very antithesis of the core values of Facebook. It's hard to see how the purchase price could ever be recouped without turning it into something fundamentally different than what it is today - by adding ads, gimmicks, and games.