I think it is hard to call IG and WA bets. He simply bought the competition that was set to wreck his platform.

Meta actually pioneered the Buy The Competition strategy in a brand new way.

1. Larger acquisitions. IG was $1B for a 13 employee company. WA was $22B. We were all talking about how big those numbers were at the time, but looking back they seem like mid-sized acquisitions. Before, most companies would have looked at these numbers and tried to build it themselves, or underbid, or just not pull the trigger. Blockbuster and Netflix. Yahoo and Google.

2. He meet the user where they were. He made no meaningful and instant change to the apps. There was no rebranding. They still have their own login screens and apps. Many casual users might not notice their major platforms are owned by the same company. Compare this to more old-school tech companies like Oracle buying Sun, or a national cellphone provider buying a regional one, or whatever happens with AOL-Time-Warner-Discovery.

Not as easy as it sounds, most acquisitions are not integrated well. He was astute in determining they were going to be 100X what he paid( and he paid a lot by the standards of the day).

Why didn't other CEOs buy them to wreck Zuck's platform?