Facebook isn’t just popular with its 1.3 billion (and counting) users.
According to “The Facebook Effect,” Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick’s brilliantly-reported book about the company’s founding, Facebook has also always been very popular with executives hungry for a merger or acquisition.
As early as four months after Facebook’s inception, investors and executives began lining up to beg Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to take their cash and sell the company. Zuckerberg turned all their offers down, but some got much closer than we ever imagined.
Here are all the times that Facebook almost sold out:
1. An unnamed NYC financier offered $10 million
Facebook, then TheFacebook.com, went live in February 2004. Just four months later and prior to any outside investment, a 20-year-old Mark Zuckerberg fielded a $10 million offer from an unnamed New York financier. According to Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg never took the offer seriously.
One early bidder for Facebook was Friendster, former Friendster executive Jim Scheinman told VentureBeat in 2007.
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The meeting didn’t go anywhere, but the issue rose again in the fall of 2007. Google’s top ad salesman, Tim Armstrong, convinced the company’s board to let him pursue a deal in which Google would serve Facebook’s international ads.
“The board even approved talks about buying [Facebook], if it made sense,” writes Kirkpatrick. Google never got the deal, but its offer to invest in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation reshaped Mark Zuckerberg’s company forever.
4. Viacom
During the Spring of 2005, Facebook (still TheFacebook) was talking to The Washington Post Company about an investment. Out of nowhere, Viacom offered $75 million to buy the company. Zuckerberg would have earned $35 million on the spot, reports Kirkpatrick.
Viacom refused to give up. Focus groups were telling them that MTV viewers were spending more and more time on the site. In the fall of 2005, Zuckerberg flew to New York to meet with CEO Tom Freston.
Freston pitched all kinds of synergies between MTV and Facebook. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested. “It was a no-thank-you meeting,” a source tells Kirkpatrick.
In early 2006, MTV boss Michael Wolf stopped by Facebook one last time. Zuckerberg told him he thought the company was worth $2 billion.
A couple of weeks later, Viacom sent Facebook a $1.5 billion offer – $800 million in cash up front, the rest via payout later.
Facebook almost sold, according to “The Facebook Effect,” but it wanted a bigger upfront payment. Viacom’s CFO was nervous about paying so much for a company with such small revenues. The deal fell apart. Viacom never came back.
5. MySpace
