As Facebook When Instagram was acquired in spring 2012, the photo-sharing app had just 50 million users and wasn't making any money. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg decided to spend $1 billion on the burgeoning competitor anyway was met with scepticism by some, while others saw it as a smart move to get in before Instagram really took off. In hindsight, the latter were right, as the following graph shows.

The photo-sharing app now has 1 billion monthly active users, that Advertising business well underway and Instagram Stories is the first line of defence from Facebook against Snapchat and become. One can only imagine how much Instagram would be worth today, but given that Snapchat's parent company, Snap, is valued at over $16 billion with a fraction of Instagram's users, it is safe to say that Instagram's acquisition price was a well-spent billion.