9 April 2012: Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion
On April 9, 2012 Mark Zuckerberg agreed to buy Instagram, a photo app with about 13 employees and no revenue, for $1 billion in cash and stock. Critics called it a bubble-era vanity purchase just weeks before Facebook's own IPO. Instagram went on to reach more than a billion users and become one of the most valuable businesses inside the company. Regulators later called it the deal that removed a rival.
The lesson: A price that looks absurd for today's numbers can be cheap for tomorrow's; judge the business, not the headline.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Facebook / Meta at the start of 2015 → $8,974 today, vs $3,301 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2015, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 9.0 times the money, and $5,673 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Facebook / Meta teaches: Founder control cuts both ways: Zuckerberg's unchecked authority produced brilliant acquisitions and an expensive metaverse detour, and shareholders could vote on neither.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $78.00 | $8,974 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $180 | $3,889 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $210 | $3,333 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Facebook / Meta? Every starting year and the full story →
More Facebook / Meta history
- 3 February 2022: Meta loses a record chunk of value in a day
- 10 April 2018: Zuckerberg testifies and Facebook stock rises
- 18 May 2012: Facebook's bumpy IPO
- 26 July 2018: Facebook loses about $119 billion in a day
- 4 October 2021: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp go dark for hours
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
Play Sixty-40