Snapchat Previously Rejected Mark Zuckerberg's $3B Buyout — Now Abysmal Earnings Worry Investors That Meta's Too Far Ahead To Catch

Snap Inc. SNAP versus Meta Platforms Inc. META was always something of a David versus Goliath story. Meta, formally Facebook, was founded in 2004 while Mark Zuckerberg attended Harvard University, seven years before Evan Spiegel's Snapchat was started at Stanford University. Through the years, Meta has consistently looked to fend off up-and-coming rivals through any means necessary.

In 2013, just two years after Snapchat's founding, Facebook came in with a $3 billion offer to buy the nascent company to gain the younger users that Snapchat was seeing massive success in attracting.

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That offer was rejected by a bold Spiegel, sealing the two company's fates as competitors in the social media space. While Snapchat was likely worrying about how it could take on industry giant Facebook, fresh off its 2012 initial public offering (IPO), it might not have realized Facebook's secret weapon would be another of its recent acquisitions.

For $1 billion, Facebook acquired Instagram, a core tool to soon copy Snapchat's innovative features, while still reaching the coveted younger demographic. Given that Facebook was not able to buy the newest thorn in its side, Facebook decided it had to build the features that made Snapchat enticing. Take Instagram stories, a feature similar to Snapchat stories. Instagram stories are used by over 500 million users every day.

Daily users of that single Meta-owned feature surpass the 414 million daily active user count Snapchat reported in its most recent earnings release.

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The size of that gap, on top of a brutal quarter where Snapchat saw its stock dive about 35% on the day after its Feb. 6 earnings were released, has only grown more alarming as Meta's stock has soared about 36% year to date.

"The company's rebound hasn't kept pace with the big tech titans,"  Insider Intelligence principal analyst Jasmine Enberg told the Financial Times. According to Enberg, it’s not just Snapchat but the fight smaller companies are having against their larger competitors in general. "We’re seeing the bigger companies get bigger and smaller companies are slower to rebound," she said.

In an attempt to explain an earnings report where revenue fell well short of Wall Street's expectations, Snapchat cited "the onset of the conflict in the Middle East" as "a headwind to year-over-year growth of approximately 2 percentage points."

Regardless of the recent sell-off in the stock, Snapchat has done well as an independent company, still valued at about $18 billion, or six times more than what Meta was willing to pay for it in 2013.

However, if you invested in Meta stock at the start of 2013, you'd be up over 1,700%, well higher than the return Snapchat's team got by rejecting the offer to try to compete against the industry giant.

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