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WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum sold $300 million worth of Facebook stock to pay of taxes

WhatsApp cofounder Jan Kuom recently sold $300 million worth of Facebook stock to pay off taxes he got after he sold his company.

Business Insider reported that disposing those stocks is more notable considering his rags-to-riches story, from being born in Ukraine in a house without running water into the third richest entrepreneurs under 40 in Forbes' list with a net worth of $8.8 billion.

On prioritizing user privacy, Kuom said, "We want to know as little about our users as possible. We don't know your name, your gender... We designed our system to be as anonymous as possible. We're not advertisement-driven so we don't need personal databases."

According to Know Your Mobile Facebook acquired WhatsApp for an amount of $19 billion February of 2014. With Messenger and WhatsApp combined, Facebook now dominates 79 percent of the entire IM market. Mark Zuckerberg said WhatsApp will keep its look and feel, and there will be no crossovers between the two messaging apps.

Zuckerberg said, "WhatsApp is a great company and it's a great fit for us. Already almost half a billion people love using WhatsApp for messaging. It's the most engaging app that we've ever seen that exists on mobile by far. About 70 per cent of people who use WhatsApp use it every day, which kind of blows away everything else that's out there."

Neurogadget reported that WhatsApp now has almost one billion monthly active users, since it was acquired by Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook Messenger now has over 700 million MAUs.

EMarketer recently reported that 1.4 billion out of the 3 billion MAUs that uses messaging apps will be using smartphone to contact people by the end of 2015. This is a 30 percent increase from last year. Emarketer also reported that in the next three years, 80 percent of people who use mobile phones will contact other people using messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp.


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