Facebook buys WhatsApp for $19bn

In what is termed as Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg's master stroke, he just bought WhatsApp for a whopping $19bn and posted a message on his FB wall announcing this big buy that stunned everyone.

That $19 bn price Facebook gave was indeed mindboggling given that WhatsApp is still a startup despite its 450 mn strong user base has just about 55 employees.

WhatsApp Inc. was founded in 2009 by American Brian Acton and Ukrainian Jan Koum - both ex-employees of Yahoo!

Why Facebook bought WhatApp? Explains Zukerberg: 

"I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire WhatsApp and that their entire team will be joining us at Facebook. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by building services that help people share any type of content with any group of people they want. WhatsApp will help us do this by continuing to develop a service that people around the world love to use every day. WhatsApp is a simple, fast and reliable mobile messaging service that is used by over 450 million people on every major mobile platform. More than 1 million people sign up for WhatsApp every day and it is on its way to connecting one billion people. More and more people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with all of their contacts every day. WhatsApp will continue to operate independently within Facebook."

"The product roadmap will remain unchanged and the team is going to stay in Mountain View. Over the next few years, we're going to work hard to help WhatsApp grow and connect the whole world. We also expect that WhatsApp will add to our efforts forInternet.org, our partnership to make basic internet services affordable for everyone. WhatsApp will complement our existing chat and messaging services to provide new tools for our community. Facebook Messenger is widely used for chatting with your Facebook friends, and WhatsApp for communicating with all of your contacts and small groups of people. Since WhatsApp and Messenger serve such different and important uses, we will continue investing in both and making them each great products for everyone."

"WhatsApp had every option in the world, so I’m thrilled that they chose to work with us. I’m looking forward to what Facebook and WhatsApp can do together, and to developing great new mobile services that give people even more options for connecting. I've also known Jan for a long time, and I know that we both share the vision of making the world more open and connected. I'm particularly happy that Jan has agreed to join the Facebook board and partner with me to shape Facebook's future as well as WhatsApp's. Jan and the WhatsApp team have done some amazing work to connect almost half a billion people. I can’t wait for them to join Facebook and help us connect the rest of the world," added Zukerberg.