1) Having been around the edges of it at the time - it wasn’t just that Facebook got acquisitions done; it was the price they paid for the assets they assembled 💰.
2) Most of these acquisitions were of revenue-less companies. Valuing them was more of an art than a science. And you’d be naive to think Facebook didn’t use this to their strategic advantage.
3) The price is paid for these companies was consistently and conveniently out of range for FB’s competitive set. But the deals had the happy little accident of driving comparable company values beyond the point where Twitter et al could realistically acquire them to keep pace.
4) So FB got the premium asset in a category (images, messaging, etc) while making it impossible for competitors to realistically structure a viable deal with legitimate number twos in a respective space.
5) The perceived value of a lot of tech companies jumped dramatically in response to these deals - even those seemingly unrelated that are now becoming part of the war (commerce, marketplace, fintech and payments). The acquisition prices FB paid put most of them out of reach.
6) It was understandable from FB’s perspective. These deals were big bets with binary outcomes. $5-$10 billion here or there had negligible impact on the expected value of the outcome. Either it was gonna be huge or nothing. So, why not flex on the competitive set?
7) I will always believe the (seemingly) astronomical valuations paid in these deals were strategic and intentional; in these cases, the rising tide sunk Facebook’s most threatening ships.
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