A Billion Dollars Was Already on the Table
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A Billion Dollars Was Already on the Table
In the summer of 2006, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg verbally agreed to sell Facebook to Yahoo for a billion dollars — then watched the deal disintegrate over four weeks as Yahoo's CEO panicked after a catastrophic earnings report and cut his own offer by two hundred and fifty million dollars. This episode reconstructs that sequence in detail: who held the power, who was in the room, who was calling from outside it, and what the board pressure actually looked like when the moment came.
The four beats here are tightly knotted. The decision moment produced a dissent story that runs in two directions simultaneously — Thiel and Breyer pushing Zuckerberg to sell, Andreessen pulling him to hold. And then there's the counterfactual question, which this episode treats as an empirical one rather than a speculative one: given Yahoo's acquisition record going into 2006, was there any plausible world in which Facebook thrived inside Yahoo? The Overture autopsy and the Flickr case both speak directly to that.
Sources
- WIRED: How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform (2007)
- Inc.: Peter Thiel Talks About the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo's $1 Billion
- Los Angeles Times: Yahoo Results Disappoint; Shares Drop (July 19, 2006)
- Business Insider: Why Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo's $1 Billion Offer (2017)
- Peter Thiel, Zero to One — Goodreads quote on the Yahoo offer
- Business Insider: Yahoo Could Have Bought Facebook for 2% of Today's Valuation (2011)
- The New Yorker: Tomorrow's Advance Man — The Mind of Marc Andreessen (2015)
- NYT Bits Blog: How Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Shames Terry Semel (June 2007)
- CompaniesMarketCap: Yahoo Inc. — Market capitalization history
- CNBC: Verizon completes acquisition of Yahoo as Marissa Mayer resigns (June 2017)
- TechCrunch: Facebook's IPO — An End To All The Revenue Speculation (2012)
- NYT: Microsoft to Pay $240 Million for Stake in Facebook (October 2007)
- WRAL: Facebook and Amazon hit $500 billion milestone (July 2017)
- NPR: Yahoo's Other Billion-Dollar Bets — Where Are They Now? (2013)
- Reuters: Yahoo's acquisitions from Geocities to Tumblr
- VentureBeat: As Tumblr's value heads to zero, Yahoo's 5 worst acquisitions
- HKS Student Policy Review: Eliminating Desire
- Wired: How Yahoo Blew It (February 2007)
- Benzinga via TradingView: Palantir's Peter Thiel Highlights Impact of Founders, citing Zuckerberg's Facebook example (2024)
- NYT: Yahoo Woos a Social Networking Site (September 22, 2006)
- CNBC: Facebook closes above $1 trillion market cap for the first time (June 2021)
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