Exclusive: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind
www.forbes.com
Facebook’s $22 billion WhatsApp purchase made Brian Acton one of the richest people in America. But his idealism clashed with Mark Zuckerberg’s financial juggernaut. For the first time, Acton explains why he left.

Under pressure from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg to monetize WhatsApp, he pushed back as Facebook questioned the encryption he’d helped build and laid the groundwork to show targeted ads and facilitate commercial messaging. Acton also walked away from Facebook a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested. “It was like, okay, well, you want to do these things I don"t want to do,” Acton says. “It’s better if I get out of your way. And I did.” It was perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history. Acton took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door—the decision cost him $850 million.

  • trailee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    Probably more relevant today than when the article was first published 7 years ago, this is the guy who went on to make Signal possible in its current form.

    If walking away from $850 million feels like penance, Acton has gone further. He has supercharged a small messaging app, Signal, run by a security researcher named Moxie Marlinspike with a mission to put users before profit, giving it $50 million and turning it into a foundation. Now he’s working with the same people who built the opensource encryption protocol that is part of Signal and protects WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion users and that also sits as an option on Facebook Messenger, Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Allo messenger. Essentially, he’s re-creating WhatsApp in the pure, idealized form it started: free messages and calls, with end-to-end encryption and no obligations to ad platforms.

    Acton says that Signal now has unspecified “millions” of users, with a goal to make “private communication accessible and ubiquitous.” While Acton’s $50 million should take it a long way—Signal could afford only five full-time engineers until he came along—the foundation wants to figure out a perpetual business model, whether that means taking corporate donations like Wikipedia or partnering with a larger company, as Firefox has done with Google.

    None of the other private messaging services that people like to talk about on Lemmy have a solidly moral billionaire on their side.

    • vas@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      Though it’s nice to have support from wealthy people… Building a cult around any single rich person for them to give grants to their liking is not a good idea.

      Instead I believe you need to fight for your right to have privacy. Currently it’s Europe who is at risk with ChatControl ( https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ ). At other times, it’s other countries. Some open projects (like Lemmy!) get funded by the European Commission. I believe this is a healthier approach than to believe in good rich guys who’d save you.