Rejected by Facebook in 2009, he co-founded a company Facebook bought for $19 billion

The irony at the center of one of tech’s most cited acquisition stories starts with a job rejection. Brian Acton, a longtime Yahoo employee, applied to Facebook in 2009 and did not get the job. He posted about it publicly on August 3, 2009, describing the process without complaint — noting he had met ‘some fantastic people’ and was headed toward ‘life’s next adventure.’ Facebook wasn’t alone in passing on him; a post from earlier that May shows Twitter had rejected him too.

Acton’s path from there led him to Jan Koum, someone he already knew from Yahoo, who was building what would become WhatsApp — a messaging app tied to a person’s phone number and contacts rather than a traditional social media profile. Acton joined Koum’s project, and it grew quickly as smartphone adoption accelerated and users looked for simpler ways to message across borders without SMS fees.

The scale WhatsApp reached by 2014 explains why Facebook came calling. According to Facebook’s official acquisition announcement from February 2014, the app had surpassed 450 million monthly users, with 70 percent active on any given day, and was adding more than a million new users daily. Its message volume was closing in on the entire global SMS traffic handled by telecom carriers — a level of usage that made it one of the most valuable messaging platforms in the world.

Facebook confirmed a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp on February 19, 2014. The transaction, as detailed in the acquisition press release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, consisted of approximately $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook stock, an initial value close to $16 billion, plus $3 billion more in restricted stock units for WhatsApp’s founders and staff vesting over four years. Combined, those figures produced the roughly $19 billion valuation widely attached to the deal, though it was never handed to Acton as a personal payment — it was distributed across shareholders, founders and employees per the agreement’s terms.

The acquisition officially closed on October 6, 2014, according to Facebook’s SEC filings, including its 8-K disclosure confirming completion. Five years after rejecting Acton’s job application, Facebook had agreed to spend up to $19 billion acquiring the company he helped co-found — a detail that continues to resurface as a reminder of how unpredictable career setbacks can turn out to be.

Wikimedia Commons/by Dan Taylor