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Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

Interesting factoid: Snap's current market cap ($18.1B) is lower than the price Facebook paid for WhatsApp ($19B). Snap is now "only" worth $4B more than Twitter.

Does FB wait for the price to fall and take them out for $10B? Or grind them to dust to make an example of any startup foolhardy enough to forgo an acquisition offer?

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Why would FB want them? They have successfully replicated Snap's model and are taking their users/recapturing shared users.

WhatsApp had large marketshare and growth outside of FBs core markets.

First of all, what's your source on the claim that Snapchat are taking/recapturing users, is that proven by anyone or are you making assumptions? Secondly, your question why FB would want SNAP is kind of nonsensical when you consider that FB placed a $3B bid on Snapchat in 2013 -- demonstrably FB does want Snapchat, if nothing else they want them so that they go away.

WhatsApp has so many more users (maybe ten times as many?) than Snap

The 2 founders own majority share of voting rights so facebook could not unless they agreed to it

Snap went beyond just retaining a majority of voting control with the founders. Due to the share structure, the two Snap founders control 88.5% of the voting rights. Their shares are worth 10x, and publicly traded shares are worth 0x.

Anyone with holdings in Snap who aren't named Evan Spiegel or Bobby Murphy have only one option: sell the stock and recoup whatever they can. That's what people are doing. Snap's share price will not substantially recover, and there won't be a return from an acquisition until the business completely runs out of money.

That alone is almost enough to make me want to see them crash and burn.

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