Facebook made a huge splash in the tech world on Wednesday with a $16 billion deal to buy WhatsApp, a messaging start-up â€" the social media giant’s biggest acquisition by far.
Naturally, the deal touched off a torrent of chatter on social media. Some professed shock at the big numbers, including an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units for WhatsApp employees and founders. Some ran back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to make sense of those figures.
While analysts grapple with the implications of the deal, here is the immediate take, courtesy of Twitter.
First, the news.
That’s a big number!
So, what is WhatsApp, exactly?
One thing it’s not is a massage service.
Here’s a word from the founders, who started the company in 2009. The tweet by Jan Koum is from 2012, and those by Brian Acton are from 2009.
Some wondered what the deal meant for Instagram, the photo-sharing company led by Kevin Systrom, which Facebook bought for $1 billion in 2012.
Others drew a connection to Snapchat, which Facebook reportedly tried to buy last year.
There was plenty of speculation about what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was thinking. Facebook assured the founders of WhatsApp that the service would “remain ad free and they will not have to compromise on their principles,†according to Sequoia Capital, a WhatsApp investor.
To many, the deal seemed like a new milestone in the frenzy over tech start-ups.
