Former WhatsApp executive says he regrets the startup's sale to Facebook

The erstwhile Chief Business Officer of the popular messaging platform WhatsApp Neeraj Arora,

who assisted in the acquisition of Whatsapp by Meta earlier known as Facebook says that he now regrets it. The messaging platform was acquired by

Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook

in 2014 for around $22 billion in cash and stock. Facebook took over  WhatsApp in a multi-billion dollar deal. This acquisition is the biggest acquisition for the company. Meta acquired the messaging platform after five years WhatsApp was launched.

In a series of tweets, Neeraj Arora informed about the circumstances under which the deal was inked and the promises made by Facebook to convince Brain Acton, founder of Whatsapp to sell the app to the social media company.

In a tweet, Arora said, “In 2014, I was the Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp and I helped negotiate the $22 billion sale to Facebook. Today, I regret it.” According to the former Chief Business Officer of Whatsapp, Facebook had approached WhatsApp for acquiring the messaging app in 2012/2013 and Whatsapp then had rejected its offer.

However, Facebook approached WhatsApp once again in the year 2014. Other than this, Arora told that the social media giant had agreed to WhatsApp’s following terms which were, no mining user data, no ads and no cross-platform tracking. He said, “Of course, that’s not what happened.”