Keep in mind the Ministry of State Security may have asked the Organization Department to suggest Tencent do this to acquire the social graph. The fact that there is investor enthusiasm only makes it easier. This is potentially equivalent to Yuri Milner's investment actions to launder Putin's money through YCombinator and get intel along the way.

FB’s advisor on the WhatsApp acquisition was a boutique investment firm headed at the time by former CIA director George Tenet. To this day I think that Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype (which was quite expensive at the time) was also made under the same auspices, i.e. to bring an entire social network under the control of a country’s intelligence services (in this case the US services). What I’m trying to say it’s that this is a well-known game that everyone is playing.

Definitely not limited to one country - they are basically one of the largest video game companies in the world with majority holdings in Riot Games, Supercell, Epic Games and a large percentage of Activision Blizzard.

SoftBank has lots of interest in international companies also, but it still isn’t an international brand.

Since I am a Sprint Customer they are pretty big in my day to day life.

Isn’t that kind of like how Deutsch Telecom owns T-mobile, but not many really know or care? Is SoftBank trying to make itself the brand for Sprint users?

Brand and size of US capital are two different things. Yes Deutsch and SoftBank are big players in US technology.

http://www.businessinsider.com/running-list-softbank-investm...

Biggest deal is Softbank owns ARM, granted that is a UK firm but ARM really is the future especially now that Windows 10 can run on ARM. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-07/arm-bulks...

The original statement was most people don’t know Tencent is bigger than Facebook (in market cap). That’s simply because most people don’t know what Tencent is, like they don’t know SoftBank or Deutsch Telecom. They aren’t international brands.

Your worried about semantics. Tencent's corporation holdings and size doesn't isn't increased or decrease by people's knowing the name Tencent. It actually strengthens my statement that Tencent is bigger than people understand, especially here in America in knowledge of name and its corporate size.

Facebook doesn't have much revenue from games, music and videos like what Tencent did. Facebook's profile mostly rely on AD, but Tencent has much more diversity income source.

Just like League of Legends is limited to one country /s

edit: For clarification, they own a majority share in companies like Riot Games. Their presence is emphatically not limited to one country.

Yes, Tencent has been trying to break into other markets like India with little success, and they do have Chinese overseas users. But ask a Cambodian or a Vietnamese if they use Facebook or wechat, they are 100% going to say the former and not the latter.

I think his point was that Tencent makes half of its revenue off games (which is a global business), even though people primarily associate it with WeChat (and social networking).

Tencent owns Supercell, whose games (Clash of Clans primarily) have over 100 million daily active users worldwide.

That's just one Tencent property.

They also own a large share of Riot Games.

They own 100%.

Just one person's idle speculation. It is not clear why the person has particular insight into Tencent's intentions.

>almost completely limited to one country.

Well, they also have South Africa...