Technology History | 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park — The Billion-Dollar Price That Was Never Paid

Facebook announced on 9 April 2012 that it was buying Instagram for about US$1 billion. The figure it eventually recorded was US$715 million. Nothing was renegotiated. The deal was US$300 million in cash plus 22,999,412 Facebook shares, and those shares were worth whatever the market said on the day it closed. Facebook went public on 18 May 2012 at US$38 a share and then slid for months. The stock sat at US$18.92 when the acquisition completed on 6 September. What the money bought was a company of thirteen employees with roughly 30 million users and no revenue. Instagram had just moved across South Park Avenue in San Francisco, from number 164 to number 181, so the photographers who staked out the office on announcement day were aiming at a door the staff had barely used. The Federal Trade Commission reviewed the purchase and closed its investigation on 22 August 2012, voting 5-0 to let it through. That clearance would embarrass the agency eight years later. The buyer was already at this address. Facebook had taken over Sun Microsystems' vacated Menlo Park campus during 2011 and given the internal street the vanity name 1 Hacker Way, while the sign at the entrance carried the postal address, 1601 Willow Road. The sign itself is a hand-me-down. Facebook's real estate team wrapped the front of Sun's old sign with the thumbs-up emblem and left Sun's logo facing the other way. The thumbs-up came down on 28 October 2021, replaced by Meta's infinity mark on the day of the rebrand. Sun's logo is still on the back. Drivers pull off Willow Road most days to photograph it, which makes this one of the few landmarks in Silicon Valley that is a sign and nothing else. The buildings behind it are closed to the public, and the deal that put Instagram inside them was argued over in a federal courtroom for five years afterwards. Cover: photo by LPS.1, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, showing the campus entrance while the thumbs-up sign was still standing.