Mark Zuckerberg Didn't Sell Facebook For $1B But Would He Have Sold For $5T? This Was Meta CEO's Thought Process

In 2006 reports surfaced that after Mark Zuckerberg countered Viacom's $750 million offer for Facebook and got rebuffed, Yahoo came up with a $900 million offer. However, the deal never went through and Facebook, now rebranded as Meta Platforms Inc. META currently has a market cap of $1.22 trillion. 

What Happened: In a conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, which was posted on his YouTube channel last week, Zuckerberg spoke about his thought process at the time when these deals were offered, and whether he would have sold the tech giant for $5 trillion instead of $ 1 billion. 

Patel asked the Meta CEO that in 2006 he didn’t sell Facebook for $1 billion, “but presumably there’s some amount you would have sold for.” 

“Did you write down in your head like ‘I think the actual valuation of Facebook at the time is this and they’re not actually getting the valuation right?’ If they'd offered you $5 trillion, of course you would have sold. So how did you think about that choice?”

In response, Zuckerberg said that at the time, he wasn't “sophisticated enough to do that analysis.” However, he had people who were making arguments for and against the deals. “It was very far ahead of where we were at the time. I  didn’t really have the financial sophistication to really engage with that kind of debate,” he said. 

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Zuckerberg went on to admit that he believed in what he was doing and his analysis revolved around personal questions and thinking about what he would do if they sold Facebook. The Meta CEO said that he thought to himself that even if he sold the company, he would just build another tech giant like Facebook so what’s the point of selling it.

“I did some analysis like ‘what would I do if I wasn't doing this?,'” adding,”‘So I think if I sold this company, I’d just go build another company like this and I kind of like the one I have. So why?'”

hoto by Alexandros Michailidis on Shutterstock

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