[talltofu]

Highly impressed. I used to brush him off as just another wunderkind who got lucky. In retrospect, his business acumen, especially when acquiring Instagram for a then pricely sum of a billion dollars has made me realize that he truly is special.

[Ollinson]

Very possible a typo but the term is "princely sum."

No criticism but if you didn't know I thought you might want to.

[mandeepj]

Not just instagram. We should not forget to mention Whatsapp, internet via drones and Oculus

[puredemo]

Whats App was a huge mistake though. That data is not worth Billions.

[adventured]

If WhatsApp can ultimately generate $1 billion per year in net income, it's worth ~$19 billion.

It's extremely likely they can do that, if they can hold their market position. The business itself is capable of being very profitable over time, and has an extraordinarily low per user cost to operate.

It's not likely WhatsApp will ever be a wildly profitable purchase for Facebook, but it doesn't need to be. Half the point was to eat a rival, the same reason they bought Instagram.

The likely worst case scenario right now, outside of WhatsApp imploding, is that Facebook overpaid by 1x. To grab a billion users, and fend off a huge potential threat, that's easily worth single digit billions of dollars to Facebook.

[yen223]

You seriously underestimate the sheer number of people who use WhatsApp on a daily basis.

[vonklaus]

To summarize Marc Andreesen: When I heard about the Whats App deal, I thought, wow it's worth that much. That must be what it's worth. Should I believe someone on the internet, or Mark Zuckerberg, who had painstakingly researched it, has access to the real financials and bet his own money and the future of his company on it.

[sumedh]

Implying that business leaders don't make billion dollar mistakes.

[dingaling]

> That data is not worth Billions.

I don't know about that; the phone numbers of 600 million users ( and rising ) tied to their identity opens-up the possiblity of correlating geographic graph data.

For example, Joe with a Chicago phone number has six Seattle area-code contacts. That looks like a marketable opportunity, why not advertise him some flights from O'Hare to Sea-Tac?

[comatose_kid]

why do you think data was the only or largest driver?