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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."
~nt~
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Zynga, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, and the list keeps on growing.
Investors know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
They must really hate Zuckerberg.
the minute they monetize Snapchat with ads kids will stop using it
I know that if I was offered 3 billion dollars for some fade chat program, I'd take it! Even if it was from arch-evil FaceBook. Of course, maybe they think they can get more. And more to the point, that 3 bil is not going just to one person, it's being spread out over the shareholders and vulture capitalists, as well as the founders (if they are still around). But still!
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
When someone offers you $3B for a company with no revenues and a product that could be duplicated in a week, take the money and RUN.
FB must be brain-dead to offer that much, and Snapchat is insane to turn it down.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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 with a vested interest in the company's valuation.
.. an honest company that says "sorry, we're aren't worth so much"
I really don't understand how the "new" tech companies command such a high price point for such worthless products. Somehow Twitter is worth more than Redhat, FB is worth more than MS, and Zynga is worth more than EA? I get that there is value in novelty, and that some of the older companies may not be innovating the way they used to, but how is it possible that something trivial like Snapchat is worth more than a couple mil?
real papers, or the onion.. only time will tell..
mark zukerberg, asshole that he is, will rage over this and get arrested by the fbi after paying a group of hackers to "kill snapchat and make it as worthless as myspace". an effort that will largely succeed in its original goal; however, a long, drawn-out legal battle will result in huge settlement costing zukerberg and facebook even more than that three-billion offer.
captcha: weeping
awww, poor marky.
they want their bubble back as your offer sucked.
WTF has happened to the world. how the fuck can a chat service be worth 3 billion. You could equip every being in Africa with a generator, gas and the tools to create a new life with that much money,
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Snapchat valued is more than $3 billion as many users have smartphones. It was a wise decision by Spiegel. So why he will sell snapchat for ONLY $3 billion if he knew that the company value is more than that and getting valuable in the future.
If they turned down $3 billion, they eventually will learn that it was a really stupid mistake.
I can't help recalling that a measly *1* billion would buy you the world's most popular open source database just 7 or so years ago...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Images you can't forget but can't see after 30 seconds.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Never heard of SnapChat before
I've heard of it because my children are using it
It's basking in it's 15-minute worth of glory
If that guy isn't selling now, I don't think he will have a lot of time left before someone deflate that 3Billion price tag
The average guy will never earn that kind of money (with a legal job that is). Next year, he missed it and crashed and burned ?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)
Reminds of the time when Yahoo turned down $47.5B from Microsoft in 2008. They have regretted it since.
Google reportedly offered Groupon $6B and was turned down; the company's probably worth about $6 by now.
Facebook offered SnapChat $3B? As long as it's in cash, not Facebook stock, there's only one right thing to do, which is to take the money and run. (Or take the money and stick around, if that's the deal, but take the money. Do not play Go, Do not pass up $3B.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They must really hate Zuckerberg.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
. to flood SnapChat with $3 Billion to get them out of the market and under their growing conglomeration. Believe it or not, these guys might be onto something that will knee cap Facebook, and they know it.
What saddens me is not that they refused because they want to stay in control of their own company and product, but because they're holding out for a higher offer.
Apparently that's the only reason you'd need to run a company: get noticed for a buyout.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
If it really is true that Facebook offered them this much money (this is by no means certain, it could just be an attempt to inflate valuation) and they actually turned it down, it could well be that they feared that a due dillegence may cause Facebook to turn away, something which would hurt their floatation if they decided to do an IPO.
If your company isn't worth nearly as much as you like to present to the outside world, you don't really want close scrutiny.
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.
Personally, I don't see the value of SnapChat other than the large and increasing young user base it has. According to Evan Spiegal (SnapChat), the software is on a quarter of all UK smartphones (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24925932). From my understanding, the software's main purpose is to allow a user to send a photo or video to someone else which then gets deleted immediately after viewing leaving no trace. A nice idea, but it is a false sense of security - the 'no trace' feature can not be guaranteed due to software that can intercept these pictures or videos or even another device recording what is displayed on screen. I would guess that the NSA are already 'backing-up' these pictures for anti-terrorism analysis.
Idiots. SnapChat for rejecting, and Facebook for offering.
reminds me of chatroulette
If Snapchat has any value at all (given how poor their software seems to be), it's that they are not part of Facebook or Google.
Of course, what this is really about is that Facebook is afraid that people will start communicating using some other platform, so they are trying to buy up and kill any potential competitor.
I'm also pretty sure you could buy a number of companies with actual tangible assets and much more interesting IP for a lot less than 3 billion dollars, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... Believe it or not, these guys might be onto something that will knee cap Facebook...
Snapchat is onto something. So was Instagram. Facebook's problem is that they are Facebook, you know, that place where a lot of OLD people hang out. Kids are moving on and FB wants to follow them. Maybe FB has the cash to buy out every new social media competitor but I doubt it. And Snapchat thinks they can get more than 3 billion. Funny old world, innit?
Seriously, an ALL cash offer ... and you turned it down? You're an idiot. You're product isn't special or even that unique. Self deleting images that don't actually self delete? Come on.
With 3 billion in cash, they could have started over and had 10 years to beat Facebook at its own game, which is trivial since the Facebooks first move would have been to end the deletion part or just shut them down completely on purchase.
I totally understand not wanting to sell out, but if your price for something like SnapChat is higher than 3bn, you're just an idiot who's principals are cutting off his nose to spite his face. You might have made a stand, but it was a stupid stand to make and could have been far more beneficial to its users had they made the stand another day and walked off with the cash today.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
A nearly worthless no-revenue software company gets a $3 billion offer? Sounds like the 1990's again.
I need to have a look at dumping all my tech stocks, hopefully _before_ the crash this time.
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?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
This reminds of a line in the movie, "Entrapment".
In this case, the line would be: What can you buy with $6.68 Billion that you can't buy with $6 Billion. It was dumb for Groupon not to sell out. Just as it was dumb for the Snapchat guys not to sell out.
When you're in billion dollar territory, you've made it. You can spend the rest of your life trying to grow a $3 Billion company into a $10 Billion company, but the odds and history are greatly stacked against you. You can invest and grow that money into the same target amount, all while spending your time on other pursuits. How much innovation is left in Snapchat? How much more work is there to do with it? It's a simple, single-purpose app that does one thing very well and that's what makes it successful. Once you start tacking on features, you start losing customers and momentum. It probably reached 80-85% of its utility right out of the gate.
Take the money and go invent something else. Or buy a basketball team. Or help bring an end to disease in a developing corner of the world. But don't waste your time and talents trying to milk one good idea for a few more bucks.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I don't really see why selling to Facebook woulb be morally reprehensible.
Also, you have to consider what good things you could do with the money.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars you airily dismiss could have done a lot of good.
Varius articles have said snapchat image files may not be erased, but just hidden from the file system. (I have not verified this myself.)
The ends do not justify the means.
In particular, "Dirty money is okay because I can do good with it," is morally bankrupt.
Exactly. It's not like this guy is doing God's work. It was a class assignment that happened to take off. Sell the damn thing to facebook, let them destroy it, and use the money anyway you want. Blackjack and hookers or starving Ethiopians, what ever.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
These companies does not have to make money, in fact, the faster it burns cash, the merrier. The last bubble was because of high valuation of companies associated with the word "i"nternet. This time around, it is about association with the word "s"ocial.
Obviously, I don't mean Snapchat is the same as Digg, but rather that they are making the same mistake as Digg. After all, Digg did turn down $200 million from Google and was eventually sold for only $500k only 4 years later.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I'm not trying to quote "a phrase", lovely. I'm stating that in general they do not, and in this particular case they do not.
What if they took the money and donated it all to a charity?
This isn't murder for hire, and it's disingenuous to pretend there's a black and white moral issue involved here (or even in murder for hire... what if someone had taken out a contract on Hitler?)
Also I think you were crazy for deleting your bitcoin(s). By your definition, any entrepreneurial endeavor is a pyramid scheme simply because the people who get in first stand to benefit the most.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Most won't, because it no longer exists. They sold when offered a ridiculous amount. Sold to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.6 Billion. Out of its employees, over 100 were millionaires and two of the founders, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, became billionaires.
15 years from now, no one will know Snapchat. Whether or not the founders are rich will be up to them. From the looks of it... they won't be.
What if someone promised me $2b to beat up a stranger? Would it be okay to do it as long as I gave that money to charity? How do YOU draw the line?
Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, not an entrepreneurial endeavour.
SnapChat is shiny. Girls like it. It's worth what people are willing to pay for it. Why... it's... GOLD.
There's no way it can bubb.... umm.... hey, let me get back to you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
I don't draw lines in anticipation of hypothetical situations that will probably never happen; I just make the best decisions I can as choices present themselves based on either the facts as I know them (choosing what job to take), or my gut (choosing what to eat, no pun intended).
Based on the limited facts as you've presented them, no, I wouldn't encourage you to do it, but I'm sure there's more to such an enticing offer, and the facts might sway me to change my mind. Who was the person they wanted you to beat up? Where do you live? Where does the client live? What are the laws? What are the circumstances? Is the client a quadriplegic who was literally kicked around for years until he came into billions of dollars?
Bitcoins are more like stocks than pyramid schemes. People could acquire them very cheaply early on, and it happens that they're worth more now, but that's not because they were promised to be worth anything in the future. They're valuable because people want them, which is what makes anything valuable, not because people are tricked into buying them based on some fraudulent guarantee of a rate of return in dollars, or because people earn residuals on subsequent transfers of bitcoins. If all other currencies disappeared, bitcoins could still have value.
To be clear, I'm playing devil's advocate here. I wouldn't buy bitcoins myself (at least not right now), but I think it's overly simplistic to say that they're immoral or a scam.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's not the lack of promise of a specific rate of return that makes this a Ponzi scheme - it's the lack of wealth generation. Your early players aren't getting rich because they've invested early in a productive endeavour, but by hyping up demand for an increasingly scarce item of no intrinsic value.
Even now, so many bitcoin adherents seem to be under the misapprehension that bitcoins could genuinely be a replacement for government-regulated currencies or gold, even though there is nothing to stop governments regulating bitcoins like the USD (and changing algorithms if necessary), and gold has intrinsic value. These absurd beliefs, which seem to be deliberately promoted by those involved early with bitcoins, just fuel the bubble in a daft zero-sum game.
Stock value is based on underlying company value.
Bitcoin value is based on speculator whim.
Maybe so. The point is that "envy!" is really a baseless ad hominem.