Facebook → WhatsApp
Facebook agreed to pay $19bn for WhatsApp in 2014, a loss-making messaging app with 450m monthly users — then the largest purchase of a venture-backed company — and the deal became the reference case for buying a fast-growing potential rival before it matures, still being litigated more than a decade later.
Closed at about $21.8bn as Facebook shares rose; the European Commission later fined Facebook €110m over statements made during review.
- Value
- $19B
- Announced
- February 2014
- Completed
- October 2014
- Sector
- Technology
- Deal type
- acquisition
- Acquirer
- Facebook (United States)
- Target
- WhatsApp (United States)
Why it mattered
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, both formerly of Yahoo. When Facebook agreed to buy it on 19 February 2014 it had more than 450m monthly users, 70% of them active on a given day, and it had lost $138m in 2013. Sequoia had invested a year earlier at a $1.5bn valuation. Facebook offered $4bn in cash and about $12bn in its own shares, plus $3bn of restricted stock units for the founders and staff. It promised to keep the brand, the Mountain View headquarters and the app separate from Messenger, and gave Koum a seat on its board. Mark Zuckerberg said WhatsApp was "on a path to connect 1 billion people".
Brussels saw a modest overlap. The European Commission, notified on 29 August 2014, cleared the deal on 3 October, finding that Messenger and WhatsApp were not close competitors, that people used several messaging apps and switched easily, and that privacy concerns from combining data fell outside competition law. The purchase completed that month, with Facebook paying $4.59bn in cash and issuing about 178m shares.
What it left behind
The separateness did not last. In August 2016 WhatsApp changed its terms to allow users' phone numbers to be linked to their Facebook identities, which led to the Commission's 2017 fine: Facebook had said in 2014 that reliable automatic matching of accounts was impossible, when its staff knew it was possible. The clearance itself stood. Acton left in 2017 and started the foundation behind Signal; Koum left in 2018. WhatsApp passed 3bn monthly users, and in June 2025 Meta began selling ads in its Updates tab, eleven years after buying an app whose founders had shunned advertising. The Federal Trade Commission's 2020 lawsuit argued that Meta should not have been allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. Judge James Boasberg ruled for Meta in November 2025, finding it held no monopoly now, whatever its past position; the FTC appealed in January 2026, and the appeal was still pending in mid-2026. Buying a rival before it earns money is cheapest when its business model is still undefined — and, for the same reason, the effects a regulator cannot see at signing can return as litigation years later.