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Comment by mandeepj | Hacker News Reader

Zuck dropped the offer because Yahoo lower the price to ~$700 million. He has famously said he would have sold FB if yahoo kept the $1 billion tag.

Buying companies for billions and billions of dollars is a skill in itself and requires a vision also which is not very common. I mean to say only people like Zuck can do it

Edit - Added some more meat

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I heard Zuck give a talk where this came up. If I remember correctly, his board said he should take the money. He replied that all he'd want to do after selling FB would be to start another social network, so why not just keep working on the one he'd already got?

It wasn't amount the money.

Would the contract not define a non-compete clause, though? I mean, much less reason to buy it if the ones buying it from just do the same thing again, under a new name.

He has famously said he would have sold FB if yahoo kept the $1 billion tag.

If he indeed said that to someone, it was not famously; the prevailing mythology is definitely that he was uninterested in selling at that price. Would love to see your source if that isn't true.

Yahoo did famously miss out on acquiring Google early on because of a lowball offer ... maybe you're thinking of that?

source?

It is everywhere and part of history now. I got a link for you -

http://www.businessinsider.com/all-the-companies-that-ever-t...

Details are little bit down in the page. You can also search the page with "In June 2006, Yahoo decided it had to have Facebook"

This article says that Zuck rejected the $1b offer because he thought it was too low and that the board later rejected a lower number. Not exactly what you said. It specifically says that Zuck believed Facebook to be worth more than $1b. Which is directly counter to the statement "He would have sold for $1b."

Just having a conversation. M & A is one of my favorite topics. Zuck kept changing his mind. Following lines are also from the article. This story is now almost 10 years old so kind of hard to find related stuff.

"Yahoo lowered its offer to $850 million after announcing horrible Q2 earnings. Facebook's board took 10 minutes to reject the lowered offer"

You still haven't provided a source for "He has famously said he would have sold FB if yahoo kept the $1 billion tag.".

This article says they dropped it to $850M. It also says they turned down a B$1.5 offer from Viacom around the same time.

I don't think your claims are correct.

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