He got rejected by Facebook in 2009. Facebook paid $19 billion for his company in 2014

Brian Acton’s job search in 2009 did not go the way he might have hoped. Twitter turned him down first, according to a post he made in May of that year, and Facebook followed with its own rejection a few months later. Acton made the Facebook decision public on August 3, 2009, writing that the interview had introduced him to ‘some fantastic people’ and that he was ready for ‘life’s next adventure’ — a line that reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time.

The adventure turned out to be WhatsApp. Acton reconnected with Jan Koum, someone he had worked with at Yahoo, who was in the process of building a messaging application centered on phone numbers and contact lists rather than a typical social network account. Acton joined the effort, and the app grew fast enough that by early 2014 it had become one of the largest messaging platforms on the planet.

Facebook’s own official statement announcing the acquisition in February 2014 laid out the numbers: WhatsApp had crossed 450 million monthly users, with 70 percent of them opening the app daily, and it was gaining more than a million new registered users every single day. Its total messaging traffic was nearing the volume of all SMS messages sent globally through telecom networks — a scale that made WhatsApp an obvious acquisition target.

The formal agreement arrived on February 19, 2014, when Facebook announced it would acquire WhatsApp. Details in the acquisition press release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission show the deal was structured as about $4 billion in cash and $12 billion worth of Facebook shares, an initial value near $16 billion, with an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units for WhatsApp’s founders and employees vesting over the following four years. Together, those pieces added up to the roughly $19 billion figure that became attached to the deal in most coverage, even though it wasn’t a lump sum paid directly to Acton — the value was spread across shareholders, founders and staff under the deal’s terms.

Facebook’s SEC records confirm the sale was completed on October 6, 2014, per the company’s official 8-K filing. The gap between the 2009 rejection and the 2014 acquisition is exactly five years, and it’s that timeline — a company saying no to an engineer, then saying yes to his company for billions — that keeps the story circulating.

Acton’s calm, almost cheerful 2009 post has taken on new meaning with every retelling, less because of what it said and more because of what it turned out to be the prelude to.

Wikimedia Commons/by Dan Taylor