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Larry Ellison: “When WhatsApp sold for $19B, a lot of us were shocked... until we thought about it”

August 18, 2025

In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg bought WhatsApp and their 450 million MAUs for $19 billion.

“A lot of us [in Silicon Valley] were shocked — until we thought about it and understood the value of having access to that many consumers,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison says in this interview that took place a few months after the acquisition closed.

Ellison points out that you have to take into consideration how much traditional businesses (e.g. cable TV companies) pay to acquire customers:

“This is not the place to debate how much you can get through WhatsApp — $1 per year per customer is not going to do it — but I believe there will be opportunity to sell these same customers other things as they join your ecosystem.”

He continues:

“There was quite a battle between Facebook and Google over that property. It wasn’t that one guy did something really silly with a lot of money. Mark Zuckerberg won an auction over Google and paid a high price but got a very valuable asset in the 21st century.”

As of 2025, WhatsApp has approximately 3.1 billion MAUs globally.