Earlier in April, the business world was shocked to hear that Facebook had paid $1 billion to acquire Instagram. As it turned out, the leaders of Instagram were originally looking for a much bigger pay day and had to settle for "just" $1 billion.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, wanted as much as $2 billion for the company he helped to found. The article says that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg managed to convince Systrom to take the lower $1 billion price. Zuckerberg also told Systrom that Instagram would continue to be run as if it was a separate company.
Zuckerberg, who owns a controlling interest in Facebook, handled the negotiations for the Instagram deal on his own, according to the report. On Sunday, April 8, one day before the deal was officially announced, Zuckerberg informed Facebook"s board of directors that he was going to acquire Instagram after three days of talks with Systrom.
In his official Instagram announcement on April 9, Zuckerberg provided some hints as to what Facebook plans to do with the company, saying, "We will try to learn from Instagram"s experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook"s strong engineering team and infrastructure."