Slashdot Mirror
SnapChat Turns Down $3 Billion Offer From Facebook
Dr Herbert West writes about a reported $3 billion offer from Facebook that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel turned down. "Snapchat, a rapidly growing messaging service, recently spurned an all-cash acquisition offer from Facebook for close to $3 billion or more, according to people briefed on the matter. The offer, and rebuff, came as Snapchat is being wooed by other investors and potential acquirers. Chinese e-commerce giant Tencent Holdings had offered to lead an investment that would value two-year-old Snapchat at $4 billion. Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO, will not likely consider an acquisition or an investment at least until early next year, the people briefed on the matter said. They said Spiegel is hoping Snapchat’s numbers – of users and messages – will grow enough by then to justify an even larger valuation, the people said."
Vulture capitalists would never turn down 3 billion dollars. They may be vultures, but they know very well when to cash out.
You never accept the first offer. There's negotiation. It doesn't matter what the offer is for, or the conditions, etc. When you're selling, you don't take the first offer. Ever. Because once an offer's made, that's a signal that it's feeding time. Sharks do not hunt alone.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Or Facebook knew they would decline the first offer out of hand, and is just baiting would-be competitors to blow giant piles of money on a boondoggle. Zuckerburg strikes me as that kind of brilliant and calculating. Even if they had taken the $3B offer, Facebook could easily have made the acquisition terms so onerous as to make it stillborn.
You know how when someone commits murder for money and gets away with it you don't just say, "You just envy the murderer because you wouldn't have been able to pull it off"?
Well, same moral scenario here.
Some people - and I know it's hard for some others to believe - genuinely won't do something they believe to be morally reprehensible, no matter how much they might materially profit from it.
For example, I was introduced to bitcoins about three years ago, and it was suggested to me that I start generating some. I replied by saying that I saw no reason why I should be entitled to money just from getting in at the start of a Ponzi scheme. I did generate one or two out of curiosity anyway, but deleted them. I guess I have lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars there, but do I envy bitcoin multimillionaires? Of course not. They're operating by their rules, and I'm operating by mine. My value system is (obviously) more important to me than theirs.
Am I saying I could have achieved what every billionaire has achieved, were it not for my self-righteousness? Of course not. I don't have the engineering talent of Hewlett and Packard, or Linus Torvalds. Do I envy these guys? Again, no. H&P were naturally brilliant, and Torvalds was excellent but also in exactly the right place at the right time. There's nothing I could have done to be them. The world's not fair and I accept that. These people just... are. They were/are in leadership positions, and it makes sense why.
From what I can see, Snapchat has no revenue. They don't get anything, zero, ziltch - unless image EXIF data is worth something. No ads, no software sales (it's free!). Unless they've been saving on their servers every single pic/video sent from people's phones to later use for extortion I'd say they are pretty worthless besides a user base that's already installed on Facebook.
The user base would likely go into free fall if Facebook took them over anyway, because we absolutely know those guys would archive every single piece of information.
So $3 billion offer for a website/app, some paintings sell for $142 million, and people moaned about India spending $75 million on sending a rocket to fucking Mars. What the fuck is wrong with some people.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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