Meta bought WhatsApp 12 years ago for $19 billion. Then it bled them a billion dollars a year for six years straight, a fact that came out in court last year under oath.
The app was making about 10 cents per user when Meta bought it. We know that figure because it sat inside Meta's own slide deck the week before the deal closed.
WhatsApp's two founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, ran the app on a simple motto: "no ads, no games, no gimmicks." It was printed on the office wall.
They're both gone now. Acton walked out in 2017 and left roughly $850 million in shares on the table, because he didn't want ads inside the app. Koum followed a year later.
The new ads don't appear in your private chats, your group messages, or your calls. Those stay locked the way they always were, and Meta can't read them. The ads are going inside the Updates tab instead, the place with Status and Channels where you see the disappearing photos people post. 1.5 billion people open that tab every day. The new ads sit inside it and look exactly like the ones you scroll past between Instagram Stories.
To pick which ad to show you, Meta uses your country, your city, your language, the channels you follow, and the ads you've clicked on before.
Morgan Stanley thinks Meta brings in $3 to 5 billion a year from this. A Wall Street firm called Evercore puts it at around $10 billion a year by 2028, if Meta earns about $6 from each daily user.
For scale, Meta made $164 billion last year. Almost all of it, $160 billion, came from ads on Facebook and Instagram. WhatsApp's entire revenue was about $1.8 billion. Every dollar of that came from businesses paying to message customers on the app.
So the $19 billion bill from 2014 has been sitting on Meta's books for 12 years. WhatsApp now has 3.3 billion users every month. The Updates tab is how Meta finally starts paying that bill back.
There’s a silent disaster happening in Nigeria that nobody wants to confront honestly.
We keep shouting about unemployment, bad leadership, low productivity, corruption, poor healthcare, failed institutions and why our country is not working. But many people are avoiding the root cause.
Our education system has been deeply compromised.
A student enters secondary school or university full of dreams, intelligence and potential. Then the system teaches them something dangerous:
“You do not need competence to succeed.”
WAEC malpractice. NECO malpractice. GCE runs. Sorting. Sex for grades. Extortion. Intimidation. Victimization. Handout rackets. “See me after class.” “Talk to your lecturer.” “Settle this course.”
And after 4 or 5 years of surviving that environment, we expect excellence to magically appear.
It won’t.
A country cannot repeatedly reward dishonesty in classrooms and expect integrity in government offices, hospitals, engineering sites, courtrooms and businesses.
This is where many of our unemployable graduates are coming from.
Not because Nigerians are not intelligent.
Not because our youths are lazy.
But because too many people were trained inside a system where merit was murdered.
The painful part is this:
UNN, UNILAG, FUTO, ABU, UI, IMSU, ABSU and many others are using largely the same NUC-regulated curriculum.
The difference is standards.
The universities that still command respect are usually the ones with stronger resistance against sorting, extortion and academic fraud.
The ones collapsing in reputation are often the ones where corruption became normalized.
Once a student realizes they can buy an “A” with ₦20,000, or sleep their way through a course, or manipulate results through connections, the motivation to truly learn starts dying slowly.
And when millions of such graduates enter the labor market, the entire country pays the price.
That weak engineer may eventually supervise a bridge.
That poorly trained nurse may handle a patient.
That compromised accountant may manage public funds.
That fake first-class graduate may become a lecturer and reproduce the same cycle again.
This is no longer just an education problem.
It is a national security problem.
Countries become great because they protect competence fiercely.
Singapore did it.
China did it.
Germany did it.
South Korea did it.
You cannot build a first-world country with a third-world attitude towards education integrity.
Nigeria does not have a shortage of talent.
Nigeria has a shortage of systems that protect excellence.
And until we become ruthless about fighting academic corruption, exam malpractice, sorting, sex-for-grades and institutional intimidation, we will continue producing certificates instead of competence.
This fight is bigger than schools.
It is about the future survival of Nigeria itself.
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Nobody has fought harder for full release of the Epstein files and prosecutions of those who abused children more than I did, knowing full well that the legacy media, far-left propagandists and those who are actually guilty would:
1. Admit nothing
2. Deny everything
3. Make counter-accusations against me
I knew that I would be smeared relentlessly, despite never having attended his parties or been on his “Lolita Express” plane or set foot on his creepy island or done anything wrong at all.
Nonetheless, the extreme pain of being accused of being the opposite of who I am was worth it.
The strong must protect those cannot protect themselves, especially vulnerable children. I will gladly accept any amount of future pain to do more to protect kids and give them a chance to grow up and have happy lives.
If you want to become good at system design, then learn these 12 case studies (not kidding):
1 How ChatGPT Apps Work:
↳ https://t.co/BJTYYnAwO1
2 How YouTube Works:
↳ https://t.co/kHk3g6jz6t
3 How Google Docs Works:
↳ https://t.co/W57IkAjXpT
4 How Kafka Works:
↳ https://t.co/8rOy9KgCMo
5 How WhatsApp Works:
↳ https://t.co/VScq8QwHMr
6 How Airbnb Works:
↳ https://t.co/Bi5SAjfv5S
7 How Spotify Works:
↳ https://t.co/BxrH3oHIFS
8 How Slack Works:
↳ https://t.co/eIo29uOQOJ
9 How Reddit Works:
↳ https://t.co/o6Pw2hhj3T
10 How Bluesky Works:
↳ https://t.co/2rLYlRlky0
11 How Twitter Timeline Works:
↳ https://t.co/pF2RYmPaIG
12 How Uber Computes ETA:
↳ https://t.co/hw1hYJqQmj
What else should make this list?
——
👋 PS - Want my System Design Playbook for FREE?
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So stealing from artists is ok, AI taking everyone’s work to generate slop is ok, but Anna’s archive has to pay them??? They can all choke, greedy billionaire scum
They will not tell you that south africa does not have 8.1million of their people in IDP camps
South Africa capital market is $1.3trillion, Nigerias is $65bn
South africa generates and distribute 45mw of power mostly from coal, Nigerias is less than 10mw
South africa does not have 197m of their people under poverty income threshold
South africa does not pamper or cuddle terrorists , who destroy lives and properties
South africa does not have 1% of the kind of political thieves and bandits in Nigeria
When Meta trains it models on 80+ TB of pirated books from LibGen and other platforms, it's called 'fair use', without them having to pay penalties and / or receive some form of legal punishment, as proceedings are ongoing.
When Aaron Swartz downloaded 70 GB of articles from JSTOR in 2010 he was facing a $1M fine and 35 years in prison, before taking his life in 2013.
Unpopular advice to business owners:
Avoid registering a business a name in certain states especially Lagos State.
Honestly, it’s often safer to register a company and deal with FIRS than to risk operating under LIRS.
With Lagos, you don’t just pay tax,you pass through layers: multiple agencies, overlapping levies, constant audits, enforcement officers, and endless “clarifications.”
By the time you finish complying, you’re no longer running a business, you’re managing government pressure.
Taxation should support enterprise, not suffocate it.
NIGERIA IS A MASSIVE CRIME SCENE.
For those who may not be aware,
I will share a little true-life story that will shock you to the bones about this money.
Actually the money found in this Lagos apartment in 2017 was not only 43million dollars. They also found £28,000 and 23million naira ALL IN CASH at the apartment. Yes, ALL IN CASH.
Guess who the owner of that apartment is? A former director of the NIA and former ambassador of Nigeria to commonwealth. A gentleman called Chief Ayo Oke.
By February 7, 2019; two years later after the money was found in his apartment, the Federal High Court in Lagos issued a warrant for the arrest of Chief Oke, former director general of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), and his wife Folasade following an application by EFCC. Just before their court date, they reportedly left the country for “medical treatment”.
The EFCC then declared the couple wanted after their failure to respond to court summons. They were charged with the theft and laundering of staggering amounts of public money. One of the EFCC charges relates to roughly $43 million, £28 thousand, and ₦23 million—all in cash—that the EFCC found in this their Lagos apartment following the 2017 raid.
Another charge by the EFCC against th couple relates to $160 million that the couple allegedly diverted from the Nigerian federal government for their own use.
In 2017, after this scandalous discovery of money in his apartment, Chief Oke was suspended as director general of the NIA. The then Vice president of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo headed a committee that investigated the incident and recommended to President Buhari that the director general be removed.
Till today, NOBODY knows what happened to that money and where that money is right now. As I said above, it was not just 43 million dollars found in that house. The also found £28,000 and 23 million Naira ALL in cash. In that same apartment. On that same day in April 2017.
Now for the icing on the cake:
Guess where Chief Ayodele Oke is now?
He is quietly back in the country after Tinubu freshly nominated him few weeks ago as an ambassador. Yes, the same man who fled the country and evaded the courts when suspicious millions of dollars was found in his apartment. He is now an ambassador representing our country before the international community.
And no, what you just read now is NOT fiction, it is not nollywood and it is not a wild imagination.
Every single detail I shared here is true.
You can google it and fact-check me.
Good morning: happy Sunday.
In the early hours of 29th May 2023,
FUEL was ₦197/Liter
EXCHANGE RATE was ₦460/$
If you like believe any Statistics coming from Bola Tinubu's APC Government.
You're on your own.