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Comment by inverse_pi | Hacker News Reader

He has 6.5 BILLIONS. That's almost double what Brian Chesky (CEO Airbnb) has including paper money, more than Evan (CEO Snapchat) has, and more than Travis (CEO Uber) has including the ridiculous valuation. Just an observation.

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That really is crazy. And Jam Koum has already cashed out at least half his stocks. Billions cashed out. The amount of money between those two guys is insane.

Similarly it's crazy to see how high up people like Moskovitz are in billionaire lists. I've gotten used to Facebook being a $400B company (now they are a $500B company), so obviously stock owners like Moskovitz will be worth tens of billions, but it's still crazy nonetheless. Just checked. He's ranked 60th richest.

I guess Jam Koum has been autoselling his vested stocks for a while since I often see his name on FB's insider activity list.

Much more than YouTube sold for, total acquisition price. Which I thought was incredible at the time (and still do, considering how difficult is has been for Google to monetize, it seems.)

I think WhatsApp was just overvalued, personally. It's excellent in many ways, but I cannot see Facebook ever making their money back on it.

Acquiring threatening social competitors may be, in part, a cost of doing Facebook's core business. That is: Facebook bought WhatsApp not because they expected to make money off the acquisition, but because they were worried that they'd lose money from not doing so.

Today I was sitting in a hotel lounge in Dubai and a lady asked me to help send her geolocation to her friend. She asked whether she can use my Whatsapp. I said I don't have Whatsapp, but I have Messenger abd Viber. She looked at me very bewildered and asked, "You don't have Whatsapp? Why would you use Messenger?" I explained to her that in Europe we use Messenger and Viber, not Whatsapp. She thought I'm crazy. In the end I gave her hotspot and she left me to my crazy Messengering.

Dunno where in Europe you're based but WhatsApp is the defacto messaging app in Irl & UK

Same in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain. I saw an article that in the Netherlands it apparently is installed on 90% of all smartphones. As far as I know, WhatsApp is pretty much the default in the EU with the exception of Scandinavian countries. Norway, Sweden, Finland are more often to be found on Messenger.

In much of the world, WhatsApp is the preferred way of communication, instead of Facebook/FBMessenger. I use WhatsApp for very personal conversations with friends and family - breakups happen over WhatsApp, dates planned, personal news are all communicated through WhatsApp. Tapping into these kind of messages which tell FB way more than likes on pictures etc is invaluable for selling ads in my opinion. Even considering E2E encryption, I don't believe FB is not analysing this data when they have the opportunity to do so - the text analysis probably happens on device.

Nobody has found it doing that, though. It could be something that will be added in the future of course (let's hope not...), but "could be" is not really interesting for the current situation. It ain't analysing your chats at this time.

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