This engineer was rejected by Facebook. Five years later Facebook paid him $19 billion

There is a particular kind of irony in Brian Acton’s career timeline, and it starts with a job he didn’t get. In 2009, after leaving Yahoo, Acton applied to both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter rejected him first, according to a post from May of that year, and Facebook followed a few months later. Acton shared the Facebook news publicly on August 3, 2009, writing that he’d met ‘some fantastic people’ during the process and was ready for ‘life’s next adventure’ — a phrase that would later look almost prophetic.

That next adventure turned out to be WhatsApp. Acton teamed up with Jan Koum, a former Yahoo colleague who was building a messaging app designed around a user’s phone number and existing contacts instead of a separate social network profile. Acton joined the project, and the app’s user base grew at a pace that quickly outstripped most of its early competitors.

By early 2014, WhatsApp’s numbers had become hard to ignore. Facebook’s own official announcement of the WhatsApp acquisition in February 2014 stated the app had over 450 million monthly users, 70 percent of them active daily, and was adding more than a million new registered users every day — a pace of growth that had its total messaging volume approaching the entire global SMS traffic carried by telecom networks.

On February 19, 2014, Facebook announced it had reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp. The acquisition press release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission described a deal worth approximately $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook shares, an initial value of roughly $16 billion, with an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units for WhatsApp’s founders and employees that would vest over four years. Together, those components produced the widely reported $19 billion figure associated with the acquisition — a total transaction value split across shareholders, founders and employees, not a direct payment to Acton alone.

Facebook’s SEC records, including its official 8-K filing, confirm the deal closed on October 6, 2014. Five years after passing on his job application, Facebook had committed to paying up to $19 billion for the company Acton co-founded. His original 2009 post, understated as it was, has since become one of the more retold footnotes in Silicon Valley acquisition history.

Wikimedia Commons/by Dan Taylor