When Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, the deal wasn’t seen as obvious or a slam dunk… for Facebook. Which is a statement of the obvious, one abundantly proven by modern estimates that place Instagram’s standalone value at something north of $100 billion.
Which brings us to another statement of the obvious, that commentary after the announcement of Facebook’s purchase wasn’t all or even majority positive about Mark Zuckerberg. Some media accounts suggested Facebook overpaid, some thought it purchased a fad, and no doubt some had simply never heard of Instagram. Notable about the timing of the purchase is that Facebook floated its shares to the public a month after the Instagram acquisition, only for its shares to begin a difficult slide. By April of 2013, a year after the Instagram buy, Facebook’s shares were down roughly 35 percent.
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