All right, let's talk more about that Facebook deal to buy Instagram.

Instagram, for those of you who may not know, is a photo sharing app, kind of a postcard

type situation.

Back in 2012, Facebook, now called Meta, bought Instagram for approximately $1 billion.

It was not that much of a surprise because Facebook was struggling.

Peresh DeVay is a senior writer at Wired.

They were trying to create sort of photo sharing tools. They were trying to enter the mobile

era. But at the time, there was a lot of buzz about Instagram.

They had just raised, I think, half a billion dollars or something crazy like that.

And all of a sudden, a couple days later, Facebook meta scooped them up.

Then two years later, Zuckerberg made another purchase, this time WhatsApp for approximately $19 billion.

It was an era where people were talking about WeChat and like how that was the Chinese super app where you could do everything.

And so it was kind of a natural continuation of that that Facebook would want to try to compete in that space and have

WhatsApp become a super app and not just a social media app or a chat app.

Did anyone at the time think that this shouldn't be happening, that Facebook shouldn't be buying

up Instagram and then WhatsApp? Did anybody have a problem

with this? I don't think there was as much of a tide of anti-Big Tech sentiment because it wasn't

considered a big tech at that point. It took a few more years. So at the time, it was just

par for the course for Silicon Valley for these big companies

to scoop up smaller startups from time to time.

Apple, you know, was really known for it back then.

Google, you know, was only a few years off of buying YouTube.

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