371–380 of 831 posts
This is just sick. Does at least some tax apply to such transactions in the US? Or think what the Gates Founation woul dbe able to do with just, say, a quarter of this money.
Not saying it wouldn't be good or nice, but I don't think we'd see a noticeable difference. After all, they could always step up their spending from, what, $4BN a year?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, WhatsApp has an incredible number of very active users. It's not like the companies in 1998/99 which had no revenue, no users, but spent millions on Super Bowl ads. That said, this is a staggering amount to pay. I'm not familiar with Facebook's financials, but I'm surprised they could even afford this. I'd chalk this up to Zuckerberg's paranoia about no longer being #1 and less to a bubble.
> It's not like the companies in 1998/99 which had no revenue, no users, but spent millions on Super Bowl ads. It's not? They had users back then, too.
Does anyone know any alternatives (with group chat)?
Oh but these companies have revenue? WhatsApp and Snapchat have no meaningful revenue in comparison to their valuations. And the companies with revenue, are being valued at insane multiples (infinity for Twitter, 85 to 100 times for Facebook, 800 or so times for LinkedIn).
Sequoia just landed a 5x return on their fund with this one deal. At a rough guess, they put in $8m for 15% of the company in 2011, valuing it at around $53m. A $16B sale is a 300x increase in value, so Sequoia's stake is worth $2.4bn. Their standard fund size is around $500m. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/16/us-sequoia-funds-i...
400,000,000 active users [0] 16,000,000,000 USD ---- $40 per user That's an incredible cost. We can assume Facebook is paying for the userbase, the app itself and it's infrastructure would basically run itself. It's less appealing when you realise that there's probably a miniscule fraction of WhatsApp users that don't have a Facebook account. > WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently. You can contin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what's the point of it? They already have a working push messaging infrastructure for 1+ Billion people.
Yeah, at a minimum they should have been able to lower the price by threatening to make the exact WhatsApp functionality a subset of Facebook. (A page out of Microsoft's play book.) Edit: The Facebook Messenger has the features of WhatsApp already?! News to me, so you have a point re FB advertisement. :-)