The Four

cow goes in, the snake takes its shape. After digesting, it returns to its
normal shape, but bigger.
Much of this enormous beast is Instagram. Facebook bought the
photo-sharing site in 2012 for $1 billion. It’s proving to be one of the
greatest acquisitions of all time. In the face of ridicule (“A billion for a
company with nineteen people?”), the Zuck was steadfast and pulled
the trigger on an asset that’s worth fifty-plus times what he paid for it.
Whether or not you believe Instagram is the premier platform in its
market, it’s less of a stretch to acknowledge that it may have been the
best acquisition of the last twenty years. (And Zuckerberg wasn’t as
lucky two years later—he paid twenty times that for WhatsApp, which
had about the same number of employees.)
One way to appreciate the brilliance of this acquisition is to look at
Instagram’s “Power Index,” the number of people a platform reaches
times their level of engagement. This social index reveals Instagram as
the world’s most powerful platform, as it has 400 million users, a third
of Facebook’s, but garners fifteen times the level of engagement.