I’m not here to defend Zuck, but those acquisitions only look obvious in hindsight. People thought Facebook was insane for paying a billion for a photo sharing app with a tiny team. And while WhatsApp was ubiquitous, it was very under the radar in the US until Facebook paid what seemed like an ungodly sum ($12bn) at the time. Instagram may go down in history as one of the greatest acquisitions of all time.

WhatsApp was quoted at $19B . You are right that those two were really smart acquisitions .

While WhatsApp has not really changed all that much since the acquisition, there is very little that is the same between Instagram pre Facebook and now.

Were they worth the 1B and 19B price tag? yes totally, however both could have been done cheaper and earlier. There was lots of discussions with snap before whatsApp. The way occulus($3B) due diligence was handled also does not show give a lot of confidence. Facebook just got their way with sheer amount of money they could spend.

>...it was very under the radar in the US until Facebook paid what seemed like an ungodly sum ($12bn) at the time.

Facebook paid a lot more than 12 billion:

>...When Facebook announced its plans to acquire WhatsApp in February 2014, WhatsApp's founders attached a purchase price of $16 billion: $4 billion in cash and $12 billion remaining in Facebook shares. This price tag is dwarfed by the actual price Facebook paid: $21.8 billion, or $55 per user.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats...

I won't speak to valuations because all of these values numb my brain a bit, but both Instagram and WhatsApp were obviously quite successful at the times of their acquisitions.

It didn't seem surprising at all at the time that Facebook bought both services, many people I knew were using them as much or more for social media than Facebook. Now, the values of course were a bit gawking but I'm sure experts crawled over a lot of their own internal figures and what they would expect out of both services. If any organization had enough social media data to evaluate these services marketability, it was FB.

Everything about the Instagram acquisition was brilliant. Reminder that neither Instagram nor Facebook was making a profit at the time, and Instagram's $1B price tag was both very high at the time and minuscule in hindsight. 8 years later, Instagram is the platform that allows Facebook to still be mega successful.

If it was so obvious, why didn't Microsoft, Google or anyone else outbid them?

Facebook had a WhatsApp competitor with significant marketshare. It was $12 billion to buy WhatsApp or >$12 billion to crush the competition. In hindsight he made the right move.