Who Really Owns WhatsApp? The Most Popular Chat Application in the World – Who actually owns WhatsApp ? It turns out that many of us still don’t know who the inventor and founder of the most popular chat application in the world is, which almost everyone uses today.
The WhatsApp aka WA application can be installed on Android or iOS, and is very popular with many people because it is easy to use and quite simple.
Apart from that, this messaging service application is also widely used because the service is free and there are no advertisements in it.
WhatsApp is a chat application created by two friends, Brian Acton and Jan Koum . These two friends were colleagues when they were still working as employees. The two of them built this short message service from the beginning until now it has become the most popular chat application that is widely used.
The idea for forming WhatsApp originated from Jan Koum who saw the great potential of this application which was released in 2008 on the App Store. Just to note, the App Store is a distribution platform for iOS developed by Apple Inc.
Brian Acton and Jan Koum started this WhatsApp project with capital of USD 400 thousand from their savings from working at Yahoo. Not immediately achieving success, these two friends built WhatsApp with great struggle. They face failure after failure. However, Brian and Jan did not give up hope. Until finally in 2009, WhatsApp was successfully used on iOS phones under the name WhatsApp Inc.
WhatsApp users continue to experience a rapid increase until in 2013 users reached 200 million. The success of WhatsApp as an application has made technology companies like Facebook (META) look at this smartphone short messaging application. In February 2014, WhatsApp was officially acquired by Facebook for a value of USD 19 billion. Brian and Jan as founders of WhatsApp received as much as USD 12 billion in Facebook shares and USD 4 billion in cash.
Brian Acton and Jan Koum’s Estate
Jan Koum is a man from Ukraine who migrated to the United States. He had received a college education but did not have time to complete it because of the various problems he faced. Even though he didn’t graduate from college, Jan had extraordinary programming skills that made him determined to apply to a big company like Yahoo. Thanks to his abilities, he was accepted as an infrastructure engineer in charge of security testing. It was at the Yahoo company that Jan Koum met Brian Acton, who were both employees there.
Successfully creating a short messaging application that is used by hundreds of millions of users, Brian and Jan have managed to reap enormous wealth. Based on Forbes data as of 2021, the wealth of the two WhatsApp founders reached USD 12.7 billion or the equivalent of IDR 187 trillion (IDR 14,437 per USD). Of this amount, it is known that Brian Acton is recorded as having assets of USD 2.6 billion or the equivalent of IDR 37.5 trillion. Meanwhile, Jan Koum has assets reaching USD 10.1 billion or around IDR 146 trillion.
Your curiosity has been answered, hasn’t it, who actually owns WA? Brian Acton and Jan Koum are the founders of this popular short messaging application.
Meanwhile, currently WhatsApp has been acquired by Facebook. Brian officially resigned from WhatsApp in 2017 and founded the Signal Foundation. Following Brian, Jan Koum also resigned from WhatsApp in 2018.
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