Facebook Rejected Him - Then They Paid Him $19 Billion

In 2009, Brian Acton applied for a job at Facebook, now known as Meta Platforms Inc META. He's lucky he didn't get the gig.

“Facebook turned me down… looking forward to life’s next adventure,” Acton tweeted at the time.

Well, his next adventure would end up being a lucrative one. Acton went on to launch WhatsApp with Jan Koum, one of Acton’s former colleagues at Yahoo.

WhatsApp continued to grow, eventually receiving investments from Sequoia Capital and others.

By 2014, Facebook — just five years after passing on Acton — offered to acquire his company $19 billion. At the time, Acton held about a 20% stake in WhatsApp, netting him more than $3 billion in the acquisition.

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He wasn’t the only one who made big bucks from the deal. Sequoia Capital received nearly 5000% on its investments in WhatsApp. At the time of Sequoia’s investment in WhatsApp, the messaging company was valued at around $1.5 billion. 

WhatsApp Today: The app has more than 2 billion active users, making it one of the most popular apps in the world. Meta runs WhatsApp along with Facebook and Instagram.

Acton is an investor and a member of the board of the Signal Foundation, which runs a messaging app focused on end-to-end encrypted messaging. 

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