$14.3 Billion seems excessive for it to be a pure aquihire play. There's undoubtedly some IP acquisition (or at least exclusive access to certain IP) involved.
It's about 0.85% of Meta's market cap - less than the 1% they paid for (granted, all of) Instagram. They also paid about 1% of market cap for Oculus ($2b into a ~$220b market cap)
Seems about par for Facebook when it comes to company-shifting acquisitions.
Little known secret is they paid $2.7B, not $2B. And Zuck and the FB head of M&A were talking shit about John Carmack’s crazy wife, who was doing his negotiation for him. On WhatsApp no less.
