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In 2005, when Facebook was only a year old and still called TheFacebook, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered to sell the social-media startup to MySpace for $75 million. That’s chump change in today’s tech unicorn boom. Bargain deal or not, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe wasn’t having it. A year later, Zuckerberg tried again. This time he tacked on a zero, upping the price to $750 million. No dice. DeWolfe again refused.
Now Facebook is a $274 billion company and MySpace is...uh, we can’t remember either.
Facebook’s $3 billion cash bid for Snapchat in is another remarkable acquisition proposal that got shot down. Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel cockily snubbed Zuckerberg’s 2013 offer, brushing it off as a means to “some short-term gain.” Smart move, Spiegel. Today Snapchat, now used for much more than just sexting, is worth an estimated $16 billion and boasts some 100 million daily active users. Not bad, even if it has a ways to go to catch up to Facebook, which continues to poke at Snapchat’s trendiest features.
Related: Snapchat, Like Facebook, Now Boasts 4 Billion Video Views Every Day
For a quick look at other tech industry acquisition offers put forth in vain, for better or for worse, check out the infographic from the website sales firm Empire Flippers.
Related: You Can Now Draw On Your Facebook Photos. Here's How.
Kim Lachance Shandrow
Kim Lachance Shandrow is the former West Coast editor at Entrepreneur.com. Previously, she was a commerce columnist at Los Angeles CityBeat, a news producer at MSNBC and KNBC in Los Angeles and a frequent contributo...
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