Company rejects $3 billion offer from Facebook

[Hum]

Snapchat, a rapidly growing messaging service, recently spurned an all-cash acquisition offer from Facebook for $3 billion or more, according to people briefed on the matter.

The offer, and rebuff, came as Snapchat is being wooed by other investors and potential acquirers. Chinese e-commerce giant Tencent Holdings had offered to lead an investment that would value two-year-old Snapchat at $4 billion.

Evan Spiegel, Snapchat?s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO, will not likely consider an acquisition or an investment at least until early next year, the people briefed on the matter said. They said Spiegel is hoping Snapchat?s numbers ? of users and messages ? will grow enough by then to justify an even larger valuation, the people said.

 

Snapchat specializes in ephemeral mobile messages, including text or photographs, that disappear after a few seconds. The service has not generated any revenue, but is especially popular among teenagers and young adults, who use the app to send messages to friends.

The approaches to Snapchat come amid rising exuberance for social media, and mobile-messaging upstarts in particular. Twitter, an unprofitable short-messaging service, is valued at roughly $25 billion after its initial public offering last week. Pinterest, an image-sharing app, last month raised $225 million from investors who valued the company, which also has no revenue, at $3.8 billion.

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[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Damn. That must have been a tough call.

[Argi]

IMO pretty silly not to sell out.  Snapchat has already lost it's charm in my circle of friends - the peak has already passed.

[Hum]

I always hold out for $5 billion :p

[psionicinversion]

$3 billion, if thats just for himself hes a greedy bastard and deserves his company fall to crap...i dont even know what snapchat is tbh but im not social media type person

[Sandor]

capitalism. it's completely bonkers.

[neufuse Veteran]

facebook probably wanted them just to get rid of the competition...