Just the other day, the EU gave Facebook their blessing regarding their acquisition of WhatsApp, and now armed with the approval from both US and EU regulators, Facebook has since announced that the deal is now closed and that WhatsApp is now officially part of the Facebook network.
However instead of closing at $19 billion as it was previously reported, the price tag has since rise to an eye-watering $21.8 billion, which according to the folks at Re/code is because of the rising stock price of Facebook’s shares. WhatsApp’s founder Jan Koum will be given a large chunk of Facebook’s shares.
As for WhatsApp’s services, it seems that for now the app will continue operating the way that it is. For the most part, Facebook has largely left their acquisitions alone and to their own devices. For example Instagram which was acquired by Facebook a while back is still more or less running the same way as it did back then.
It is unclear what the future holds for WhatsApp, but we don’t doubt that Facebook has plans to take advantage of the company’s half a billion active users, although Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed his belief that it would be possible to grow that user base to 2-3 billion in the future.
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