Wednesday, February 19, 2014

3:24 PM
Screen Shot 2014-02-19 at 2.13.40 PM

Facebook just announced its buying WhatsApp, a global messaging platform with 450 million MAUs, for approximately $19 billion. It’s one of the biggest tech acquisitions since HP bought Compaq for $25 billion in 2001.


It means that WhatsApp, which raised a comparatively measly $8 million since its 2011 launch, is now worth nearly $20 billion.


Remember the good old days, when we all raised our eyebrows at the $1 billion Instagram acquisition? Or Lenovo purchasing Motorola Mobility for $2.9 billion?


Simpler times.


Since $19 billion is a ridiculously large amount of money to wrap our heads around, we decided to compare that to other ridiculously valuable things, companies and people.


Enjoy, friends!


$19 billion is…



  • 4x the market cap of BlackBerry

  • Approximately one-third the market cap of Ford

  • 2.8x the market cap of GroupOn

  • Effectively equal to the market cap of The Gap

  • Slightly more than Sony’s market cap (around 10 percent)

  • Around 3/4 Delta’s market cap

  • 7.5 Mark Cubans

  • Almost precisely 1.3 of HP’s market cap

  • 2 nuclear submarines

  • 62 percent of Twitter’s market cap

  • 76,000 trips to space on Virgin Galactic

  • almost 60 percent of Sprint’s market cap

  • 25 Instagram acquisitions


The above figures are calculated using the following metrics: The full, $19 billion dollar value of the deal, which takes into account RSUs to be given to employees following its closing; market capitalization of other companies sourced from Google Finance at close, not taking into account after-hours performance. In this way, we compare fair market rates for comparison companies, and the complete cost of the deal.





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