Whatsapp was something like 50 employees and a 400m users when FB bought them in 2014. Plenty of people (though not not all) were baffled by the 19B price that they paid at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7275470, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272641), especially in the US where Whatsapp was/is relatively unpopular.

That's a great set of links. The hotmail comparison is apt - Microsoft basically trashed / dropped hotmail? So these acquisitions can go either way?

The risk with what's up is definitely higher. That said, Facebook has an INCREDIBLE acquisition success rate with insta and whatsup.

Facebook didn't make the WhatsApp acquisition blind. They had data from their Onavo VPN service showing exactly how popular it was compared to their own Messenger.

and it holds potentially less important data. I know many influencial people including first line politicians in my country that use whatsapp on the daily, while I really can't see any of them sharing confidential information on instagram of all places.

And yes, using a service like that is an extremely bad decision in the first place, but that's where we are right now.

I can see that - I use neither and don't have the facebook app on my phone so for me it's irrelevant but I know internationally whatsup just crushes the local telcos.