Whatsapp Bought by Facebook

Whatsapp Bought By Facebook - WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum, who offered his company to Facebook in 2014, has actually been dumping Facebook supply at a consistent clip under a prescheduled trading plan, with brand-new sales numerous times a month, given that February 2016.

Facebook Buys Whatsapp

So our asked Equilar, a company that specializes in evaluating executive payment and also business data, to aid us analyze all the Stocks and also Exchange Compensation filings pertaining to Koum's sales for 2016.

Whatsapp Bought By Facebook


It ends up he's sold greater than 22 million shares worth roughly $2.8 billion considering that January.

Facebook agreed to get WhatsApp in February 2014 for over $19 billion in supply, and the cost had increased to $22 billion by October, when the deal closed, thanks to Facebook's rising stock price. Koum owned regarding 45% of the company when he offered it, Forbes estimates, which implies his take on paper was about $10 billion. He also got a seat on Facebook's board.

At the end of 2015, according to Facebook's yearly proxy filing, Koum owned over 60 million shares of ordinary shares. He likewise had an additional 19 million restricted supply devices, which vest over time and function as a reward for him to stay till November 2018.

Based upon that vesting routine, it resembles he's earned about 3 million of those RSUs until now this year.

So in general, he's offered about one-third of his current risk in Facebook this year.

Koum's stock sales come as WhatsApp remains to grow rapidly and also as the company is making changes to the service that might open up brand-new moneymaking chances, however also runs the risk of estranging some customers.

On Thursday, Facebook introduced that WhatsApp was changing its privacy policy for the very first time because the acquisition to enable Facebook to see the contact number that a user shares when they register for WhatsApp. Facebook can use this details to allow services to speak to customers directly through WhatsApp, as they can currently do through Messenger, and will certainly permit Facebook to show more pertinent advertisements to logged-in individuals. However, WhatsApp claimed it would not share these telephone number directly with users.

WhatsApp passed more than than 1 billion monthly users in February and is the most preferred conversation application in majority of the world, according to recent stats from SimilarWeb.

Facebook had no discuss the sales, as it doesn't discuss peoples' investment choices.