Neeraj Arora, who in 2014 was the Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp and who helped in the negotiation to sell the instant messaging application to Facebook for 22,000 million dollars (it was finally 3,000 million more than was announced at the beginning), has just said that today he regrets it.
In 2014, I was the Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp.
And I helped negotiate the $22 billion sale to Facebook.
Today, I regret it.
Here's where things went wrong:
— neeraj arora May 4, 2022
The reason: Facebook said it supported the mission and vision of the WhatsApp team… but it turned out not. Zuckerberg lied (as he has done at other times that we know of his history) to achieve his goal of getting hold of the app.
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The early history of WhatsApp
WhatsApp was founded in 2009 by Jan Koum and Brian Acton. Two years later, in 2011, Arora joined the team as Business Director. In 2012 and 2013 Mark Zuckerberg proposed to take over the app, but the managers at the time refused.
Facebook again proposed the purchase in early 2014 with an offer that made it seem like an association, that is, a union in which they would continue to work, in some way, together in the same direction. Facebook offered, according to what Arora tells of these negotiations, what the managers wanted to hear.
Arora has become nostalgic in his statement on Twitter, recalling that he was delighted with the app he was working on: "For people (like me) with family in several countries, WhatsApp was a way to stay connected, without having to pay SMS charges or long distance calls". At that time, the tool charged one euro to each of its users when downloading to monetize the service.
What did Facebook offer?
Facebook told them about offering full support for end-to-end encryption; never base your business on advertising; total independence in product decisions; a board seat for Jan Koum; and a separate office for WhatsApp managers in Mountain View (the town where Google is also located).
As you can see in the previous image, that note was written by Brian Acton because they were WhatsApp's maxims for any agreement. As this proposal from Zuckerberg liked WhatsApp, the conversations continued, and as the conversations progressed and they began to talk about the acquisition, WhatsApp insisted that its position was: that data could not be extracted from users; never include ads; and not tracking between platforms.
Come on, if we look at what is happening now with WhatsApp, a year after its controversial conditions of use were changed to allow Facebook to access information from the messaging app, we see that none of these conditions have been met. Arora remembers that everything went wrong from 2017.
You just have to remember that in 2018 one of the creators of WhatsApp made a tweet on his profile saying "It's time" and the hashtag #deletefacebook or Delete Facebook, thus attacking the hand that fed him a lot. Acton has already spoken publicly about this.
Meta is "Frankenstein"
A few months ago the creator of Twitter Jack Dorsey said he regrets having centralized both the Internet and social networks until they are empires in the hands of a few. Well, the former WhatsApp manager says something similar: "Technology companies have to admit when they've done it wrong."
Arora still exempts himself from blame because he says he did not imagine that those 22,000 million dollars would lead to this. Despite the fact that much was said at the time that such an amount of money could be behind the interest of Zuckerberg's company to handle more information for its huge advertising business (the more data, the more it can sell to advertisers).
"Nobody knew at first that Facebook would turn into a Frankenstein's monster gobbling up user data and spitting out dirty money. We didn't know either," he said. And he urges other people in the sector to confess about it: "for the technological ecosystem to evolve, we have to talk about how perverse business models make well-intentioned products, services and ideas go wrong" and has alluded to the new purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk.
