Facebook’s $19 Billion WhatsApp Acquisition, Contextualized

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.