One Hundred Billion Stars
A hundred billion messages a day. That's the number Dick Brouwer watches — or rather, the number that watches itself, because the system is so vast and so stable that the most dramatic thing the man responsible for keeping it alive can say about the busiest minutes in WhatsApp's history is: "The big success here was that we didn't do anything." It was December 18, 2022, the final of the World Cup in Qatar, and as Lionel Messi lifted the trophy and a rolling wave of euphoria — through Buenos Aires and Jakarta and Lagos and São Paulo — hit WhatsApp's servers, the message flow spiked to twenty-five million per second. The pipes held. The check marks turned blue.
One hundred billion messages per day is, as several people enjoy pointing out, approximately the number of stars in the Milky Way. It is a useful comparison not for scale alone but for the nature of the thing being described: a system so enormous that its totality is impossible to perceive from any single vantage point, yet whose constituent elements — each message, each voice note, each photograph of a sleeping infant forwarded to a friend at a wedding — are granular, intimate, irreducibly human. WhatsApp is the rare technology product that operates at civilizational scale while remaining, for most of its users, intensely personal. The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski had a term for what it enables — "phatic communion," the speech that conveys not information but presence, the "I'm here" that precedes and undergirds all other meaning. WhatsApp is phatic before it is anything else. An architecture of presence.
The paradox at the center of WhatsApp — the tension this piece will orbit — is deceptively simple: the most intimate communications platform ever built belongs to the largest advertising company on Earth. Its founders despised surveillance and advertising with a fervor born of Soviet-era paranoia and Silicon Valley libertarianism, and they inscribed those convictions into the product's DNA — no ads, no games, no gimmicks, end-to-end encryption — before selling the whole thing for $19 billion to a man whose fortune derives entirely from the precise opposite of those values. Both founders have since departed. The note
Brian Acton kept on his desk — "No ads! No games! No gimmicks!" — has the texture of prophecy now, or epitaph. In the summer of 2025, WhatsApp introduced ads to the platform.
By the Numbers
The WhatsApp Network
3B+Monthly active users across 180+ countries
100BMessages delivered per day
~1BPeak concurrent users at any given moment
25M/secPeak message flow (2022 World Cup final)
$19BAcquisition price paid by Facebook (2014)
~$690MQuarterly non-ad revenue (Meta 'Other Revenue,' Q3 2024)
<100Infrastructure engineers maintaining the system
55Employees at time of acquisition
A Village Outside Kyiv
Jan Koum grew up in a village near Kyiv in Soviet Ukraine — no hot water, no electricity at reliable intervals, parents who rarely talked on the phone because it might be tapped by the state. His father, who worked in construction building hospitals and schools, stayed behind when Koum and his mother emigrated to Mountain View, California, in the early nineties. Koum was sixteen. His mother had cancer. They lived on food stamps for a while. In high school, while other kids were doing whatever kids in Mountain View were doing in 1993, Koum read TCP/IP Illustrated by W. Richard Stevens — a six-hundred-page technical guide to the protocols of the internet — and then read it again. The detail matters. It tells you everything about the person and, by extension, the product: the asceticism, the engineer's preference for the protocol layer over the application layer, the conviction that infrastructure should be invisible and reliable and should absolutely never spy on you.
"To instant-message my dad then would have been something," Koum told an interviewer years later. The sentence is a compressed autobiography. WhatsApp's entire design philosophy — the obsession with reliability over features, with messages that get through rather than messages that look beautiful — descends from a Ukrainian teenager who couldn't talk to his father.
Koum worked at Yahoo, where he met Brian Acton, a colleague with a similar temperament. Acton was the anti-hype engineer, the guy who would later be turned down for jobs at both Facebook and Twitter before co-founding a company worth more than either was at the time of those rejections. They shared a loathing of advertising that bordered on the ideological. Together at Yahoo through the mid-2000s, they watched the company drown in display ads and irrelevance. They both left. They both applied to Facebook. They were both rejected.
The App Had No Usability
In the spring of 2009, Koum was thirty-three and trying to get people interested in a product he'd built for Apple's App Store, which had opened the previous summer. He tweaked the app's name every few days — Status App, Smartphone Status, iPhone Status — to make it appear among the newest releases. The idea: show people what their contacts were doing before they called or messaged them. Maybe available. Maybe at the gym. Maybe sleeping. Between five and ten thousand people downloaded it. Almost no one used it. They just called whomever they were going to call.
The app had no usability or functionality that was useful.
Then Apple did something. In June 2009, push notifications arrived on the iPhone. When one of Koum's users updated a status, it was now broadcast to every contact who also had the app. People began sharing real-time information — going to a bar, heading to a movie. The status updates themselves became the message. Over the summer, Koum worked with Igor Solomennikov, a coder based in Moscow, to add an actual messaging function. They used open-source software. They enlisted friends to test it. Koum was in his home office in Santa Clara when he saw the first messages flow between two people on his network.
"I was, like, Holy shit, I just built a messenger for iPhone," Koum recalled. WhatsApp became WhatsApp. The network came alive.
The origin story has the shape of accident but the logic of inevitability. Koum had not set out to build a messaging app. He had built a status-broadcasting tool that happened to acquire messaging capabilities when Apple changed a single feature of its operating system. The insight — that the address book on your phone is the most intimate social network you have, and that everything else is noise — was not articulated as strategy. It was felt. Koum kept a pair of walkie-talkies on his desk, a reminder of the simplicity he was aiming for. Your phone number was your identity. No avatars, no PINs, no passwords. Your online identity was yourself.
The Anti-Product
The early WhatsApp was defined less by what it did than by what it refused to do. No advertising. No games. No gimmicks. No algorithmic feed. No discovery mechanism. No growth hacking. The logo — a combination of the iPhone's dialer and messaging icons against a vivid green just a shade or two darker than Apple's — was designed to feel like you'd used it before. Anton Borzov, WhatsApp's first designer, ran a small studio called Tokyo in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. "We wanted it to look good next to the native phone," Borzov explained. The product's aspiration was not to be noticed.
This was software as infrastructure — messaging as utility, not experience. The revenue model was similarly ascetic: a one-dollar annual fee. That was it. No in-app purchases, no premium tiers, no data monetization. The decision to charge a dollar was not naïve; it was architectural. It kept the incentives clean. If users were the customers rather than the product, the company could optimize for reliability and speed rather than engagement and attention extraction. The economics were absurd by Silicon Valley standards — WhatsApp's audited financials for FY2013, filed with the SEC, show total revenue of $10.2 million against net losses — but the growth was spectacular precisely because the product was cheap enough to be indistinguishable from free and good enough to replace something people were already paying for.
That something was SMS. Short-message service was a $100-billion-a-year industry for telecom companies worldwide, and it was a terrible product. You were limited to 160 characters. Longer messages were broken up and sometimes delivered out of order. Sending photos — especially across different phone brands — was a gamble. International texts were ruinously expensive. Koum, who visited Europe often, understood the gap between how much people wanted to text and how badly the existing infrastructure served them.
You would have to call the person the next day and be, like, "Hey, did you get my S.M.S.?" And half of the time the answer would be no. The message was just dropped on the floor.
WhatsApp's engineering philosophy was relentless universality. They built not just for iPhones but for BlackBerrys, Windows phones, Nokias — the devices that actually dominated markets in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Engineers assigned to WhatsApp's various platform versions had to use those devices for their personal communication. Chris Peiffer, the company's first full-time U.S. employee, was issued a bright-pink Nokia popular among Indonesian teenagers. "We just really prided ourselves on: No, we're going to make this work," Peiffer said. "The messages are going to get through." The team hired Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesian, and Spanish speakers early, making localized versions for Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico — markets that most Silicon Valley companies treated as afterthoughts but that WhatsApp understood were the world.
The software ran on Erlang, a programming language developed in the 1980s by computer scientists at the Swedish telecom company Ericsson, designed for systems that could never go down. The choice was characteristically contrarian: almost nobody in Silicon Valley used Erlang, which meant almost nobody could copy WhatsApp's architecture, which meant the team stayed small, which meant overhead stayed low, which meant the one-dollar fee actually worked.
During 2011, the number of users rose from ten million to a hundred million.
Nineteen Billion Dollars Against the Wall
By the spring of 2014, WhatsApp had five hundred million monthly users and a staff of about fifty. The product was growing by a million users a day. Facebook, which had tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion and been rejected, came back with an offer that was designed to be impossible to refuse.
How the WhatsApp deal came together
2012Zuckerberg and Koum begin informal conversations about WhatsApp's future.
Feb 9, 2014Zuckerberg formally proposes a deal to buy WhatsApp over dinner with Koum.
Feb 14, 2014Koum crashes the Valentine's Day dinner Zuckerberg is sharing with Priscilla Chan. They negotiate over chocolate-covered strawberries.
Feb 19, 2014Facebook announces the acquisition: $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook stock, $3 billion in restricted stock units to employees — $19 billion total.
Oct 2014Deal closes. Facebook files prospectus supplement for 162.7 million Class A shares issued to WhatsApp selling stockholders.
The numbers were staggering by any measure. With 55 employees, WhatsApp commanded a price equivalent to $344 million per employee, or about $28 per user. It was the largest acquisition ever of a venture capital–backed startup. The deal valued a company with $10 million in annual revenue and negative operating margins at roughly twice the market capitalization of American Airlines.
Koum signed the paperwork against the wall of the social-services office in Mountain View — the same office where he and his mother had once collected food stamps. Forbes estimated he owned 45% of WhatsApp, making him suddenly worth $6.8 billion. The immigrant kid from a village without reliable electricity had built a communications utility that half a billion people depended on, and he'd been compensated at a rate that made the acquisition one of the richest technology deals in history.
The strategic logic from Zuckerberg's side was both defensive and expansive. Facebook was buying a hedge against the fragmentation of its own attention monopoly. Each new acquisition — Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion — was another way people chose to communicate, another graph of human relationships that Facebook could absorb before a competitor weaponized it. As one analysis noted at the time: "Facebook's product portfolio is becoming vast, full of competing services and apps, and that's okay." The company wasn't building one social network. It was buying every social network.
For a deeper look at Meta's strategic arc through these acquisitions, Steven Levy's
Facebook: The Inside Story provides essential context on Zuckerberg's thinking during this era.
The Encryption Wars
For a couple of years after the acquisition, WhatsApp maintained its own offices and its own leadership, operating with a degree of autonomy unusual within Facebook's empire. The founders used this independence to do something consequential: in the spring of 2016, Koum and Acton introduced end-to-end encryption across the entire platform. Every message, every call, every photo — readable only by the sender and the recipient. Not by WhatsApp. Not by Facebook. Not by governments.
The encryption decision was ideological and technical in roughly equal measure. Koum's childhood under Soviet surveillance was not incidental to the product; it was the product. WhatsApp and Signal use the same encryption protocol — the Signal Protocol, developed by Moxie Marlinspike — but the decision to deploy it across a platform of more than a billion users was operationally unprecedented. It meant that WhatsApp could not read its own messages, could not comply with law enforcement requests for message content, and could not data-mine conversations for advertising purposes. It was, in effect, a structural constraint on Meta's future monetization options, embedded in the codebase by founders who understood exactly what they were doing.
Just a few months after encryption was implemented, however, WhatsApp disclosed that customers' phone numbers, device information, and usage data would now be shared with the broader "Facebook family of companies." The move was legal — the terms of service had been updated — but it was a betrayal of the spirit, if not the letter, of the founders' original covenant with users. Metadata, it turned out, was its own kind of surveillance. You couldn't read the messages, but you could map the relationships — who talks to whom, when, how often, from where.
Acton left soon afterward. Later, he urged his social-media followers to #deletefacebook and donated $50 million to help grow Signal, the privacy-focused messaging app that embodied the principles WhatsApp had been built on and was now, in his view, abandoning. In 2018, Koum announced he was retiring — to collect air-cooled Porsches, the press reported, which may have been true but also had the feel of a man walking away from a product he no longer recognized.
Phatic Communion in the Trobriand Islands
In the fall of 1914 — a century before WhatsApp's acquisition — the Polish ethnographer Bronisław Malinowski began studying island communities off the coast of Papua New Guinea. In an essay from 1923, he observed that much of what people say, whether in European drawing rooms or on the Trobriand Islands, is devoid of obvious meaning. "Ah, here you are!" says nothing. But it says everything. Malinowski called this "phatic communion": language whose function is not to convey thoughts but to express "the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man."
WhatsApp is phatic before it is anything else. The double check marks, turning blue when a message is opened. The "last seen" timestamps. The tiny typing indicator — those three pulsing dots that mean your best friend, your mother, your estranged uncle is composing something right now. These are not features in the product-manager sense. They are architectural expressions of human presence, relayed through continuous socket connections on WhatsApp's servers, telling you that someone is there.
The blue check marks alone have tested more relationships than any feature in the history of consumer software. Whether to respond to a message that someone knows you have read — with a heart, a thumbs-up, a crying-face emoji, or the devastating silence of nothing — is a modern imponderable. WhatsApp's settings let you opt out of read receipts, but Koum himself found that annoying, a betrayal of the app's convivial design. The system is built to make absence visible. That is its power and its cruelty.
Linguists study the app for the way it reconfigures conversation. Utterance chunking — blasting short messages without waiting for a reply — is considered more emotionally engaging than a single, smoothly punctuated paragraph. WhatsApp conversations are more fluid and less chronological than SMS; people check whether a contact is online before unleashing the chunks. Some people are better at texting than talking. Others leave voice notes that are forty-five minutes long. Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp since 2019, discovered he and his pregnant wife had been texting about their daughter's name only to learn, after the birth, that they disagreed on how to pronounce "Naomi." Text has its limits.
Sociologists have given WhatsApp family groups their own acronym — W.F.G.s — and their own taxonomy. A 2023 study at Israel's Ben-Gurion University identified three archetypal roles: kin-keepers, committed to online family life; flickerers, seemingly indifferent; and silent warm experts, the problem solvers. The researchers found that three-generation groups exhibit strikingly similar traits across cultures: avoidance of problematic discourse, exaggerated writing style, and routine ejections. Removing a relative from the W.F.G. is the digital equivalent of slamming a door. The outcast is eventually readmitted, after a suitable period of exile. One researcher encountered the memorable case of the Palmilla family, whose group "Global Family v2" was formed after the administrator of the previous version — "Palmilla Gang Gang" — removed everybody except himself.
Linus digim'Rina grew up on Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands — the very place Malinowski had studied. He later became head of the anthropology department at the University of Papua New Guinea. When reached through a faint WhatsApp connection, digim'Rina confirmed that Malinowski's observations about exchange had held up well over a century. His main way of keeping in touch with life on the islands was through a pair of WhatsApp groups: one political, about three hundred members, and one purely social, much larger. Phatic communion was alive in the place of its discovery. The purely social chatter was, to be honest, phatic all the way down. "It's everywhere, anything, whatever," digim'Rina said. "I can't see the value of sitting there, let's say wasting my time, just trying to know what each and every one is talking about."
The Graybeards and the Hot Reload
If WhatsApp stops working, the guy who has to fix it is Dick Brouwer, a tall Dutchman with a master's in aerospace engineering who works out of Building 23 at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park. "If something goes wrong somewhere in the world, at the end of the line, they'll call me," Brouwer said. He grew up in Wassenaar, a coastal suburb near The Hague, and dreamed of becoming an animator at Pixar.
Brouwer thinks of WhatsApp as a very large collection of very small pipes. His job is to keep as many of them as clear as possible at all times. "Stuff needs to flow," Brouwer said. "If there's a hiccup, there's a problem, things are piling up on one side. We don't want them to start overflowing." The numbers he checks constantly: how many users are on the platform at any given moment — typically 700 million to almost a billion — and the flow of messages on the servers, which hovers between one and two million per second. "It's an astonishingly stable metric," he noted. "A lot needs to happen for that to actually change."
Fewer than a hundred engineers maintain WhatsApp's entire infrastructure. They wield, as one writer put it, godlike powers over human communication, but spend most of their time solving problems no one else registers. In 2024, Brouwer's team implemented a way to send large files — images, videos — separately from their smaller encryption keys. If you text a photo of a note on your fridge to someone thirty feet away in your own bedroom, the image will likely bounce off a relay station in Birmingham or on the edge of London, while its encryption key zips off to Odense, Denmark, and back, before the parts reunite into a double check mark.
During emergencies — power failing on the Iberian Peninsula in April 2025, Russia threatening to block the app — Brouwer and a small team he calls "the Graybeards" use Erlang to rewrite WhatsApp's code while it is still running. They redirect traffic, modify how the app works in specific geographies, reroute messages through different data centers, disable features like auto-downloading images. Making changes on the fly is called a "hot reload." "We try not to do that often," Brouwer said, "because it's very dangerous."
The fundamental engineering challenge is the sheer capaciousness of the system. Running on practically every type of phone, in practically every corner of the world, means you cannot know whom you are optimizing for. Sharpen picture quality for some users and you degrade the experience for others. WhatsApp groups in the Trobriand Islands may feel less snappy. "Almost every discussion we have internally, it's all about: What are the trade-offs?" Brouwer said. WhatsApp forces users to upgrade the app every three months. The network must move as one.
Asked whether there was any practical reason the whole world couldn't be on WhatsApp, Brouwer considered the question for a moment. "No," he replied. "Nothing fundamental. The challenges just add up."
A Technology of Life
Ninety-two percent of U.K. internet users are on WhatsApp. In India, the ruling party's "I.T. cell" runs an estimated five million WhatsApp groups — down to the level of each of the country's roughly one million polling stations. In Brazil, L'Oréal makes more than 20% of its online direct-to-consumer sales through "conversational commerce" over the app. In Delhi, you can buy your subway ticket to the airport and check in for your flight. In Kenya, Nigeria, and Argentina, mobile-phone providers offer WhatsApp for a few cents a day, making it some users' sole connection to the internet.
The word people use in these markets is "technology of life." WhatsApp resembles the Asian super-apps — WeChat in China, KakaoTalk in South Korea — where you can order groceries, hail a ride, and chat with your bank. In India, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia, you can send money on WhatsApp. The platform has become, in Paresh Lal's formulation, "equivalent to the old telephone network — but in the hands of one company, and not as a shared, common resource with multiple watchdogs over it."
Lal, a lawyer in Delhi, worked for WhatsApp in 2021 as its sole grievance officer in India — one person responsible for the concerns of hundreds of millions of users. He resigned after six months. "Would you not agree with me," he said, "that no one person or company should have control over this?"
The political implications are staggering. India, Brazil, South Africa, and Malaysia have all experienced their first "WhatsApp election" in the past decade. Before India's 2024 election, investigative reporter Srishti Jaswal traveled to Mandi, a city in Himachal Pradesh, and found a network of more than four hundred BJP-affiliated WhatsApp groups — roughly one for every seventy-five people in the town. The most inflammatory political content was often shared in groups with no ostensible political purpose — volunteer cleanup groups, women's issues forums — administered by party supporters who did not advertise their affiliation.
From your heart to your fingers, blood travels. Similarly, from top to bottom, these B.J.P. I.T.-cell WhatsApp groups travel.
In 2017 and 2018, digital-rights lawyer Amber Sinha traced fifty-four cases of mob violence in India — mainly following spurious reports of child abductions — catalyzed by WhatsApp groups. Syrian refugees in the Netherlands spent up to three hours a day on WhatsApp, video-calling family caught up in war, describing a state of "connected helplessness." The entanglement of WhatsApp in everyday feeling — in love and fear and political manipulation and grocery delivery and pandemic birth — makes it something other than a technology company. It is an emotional utility. And it is, as Sinha observed, beyond the intention of anyone who built it. "I don't think this is something that one can necessarily say was even planned by the platform. It has just taken on a life of its own. This is what people use. This is what you are forced to use."
The Diary You Didn't Know You Were Writing
Ben Backx, a British technologist working at a bank in Singapore, built an app called Mimoto to analyze every WhatsApp message he had ever sent or received. The algorithm studied speed of response, message length, levels of encouragement, sympathy, curiosity — whether you start the conversation or finish it, whether you laugh, apologize, compliment. "I've completely gone over the top with it," Backx said. He used Mimoto to study the dynamics of nearly every relationship in his chats. His wife asked more questions than he'd realized. His father's natural gregariousness didn't translate online. The minute, ongoing narration of his life was inscribed in the archive. Every argument, every celebration, every missed school pickup.
"I think a lot of people don't realize that, essentially, their WhatsApp history — across all their chats — is the diary they didn't know they'd been writing," Backx said.
The observation cuts to something essential about the product's nature. WhatsApp has no algorithmic feed, no public profile, no follower count. It does not perform identity; it records relationship. Studies show that users are more likely to express both happiness and sadness on WhatsApp than on public-facing platforms like X or Instagram. The intimacy is structural. The architecture rewards honesty because there is no audience — only the person you're writing to.
This is also why WhatsApp is, as Backx put it, "almost the last honest place on the internet." And it is why the platform's migration toward commercial activity — ads in the Updates tab, AI chatbots entering conversations, businesses dropping into your messages — represents not merely a product evolution but a tonal violation. The thing that makes WhatsApp valuable to three billion people is the same thing that makes it difficult to monetize: the expectation of intimacy.
The Spigot
The economics of WhatsApp have been mysterious for years. A 2023 study calculated that American users would not give up the app for less than $30 a month, giving it a notional consumer value of $25 to $30 billion a year. But WhatsApp generates only a fraction of that. In Meta's Q3 2024 earnings, WhatsApp's non-advertising revenue was buried under "Other Revenue" — a "footling total," as one observer noted, of some $690 million for the quarter. Meta's ad revenue for the same period was almost seventy times greater.
The Federal Trade Commission, in its antitrust suit against Meta, asked MIT professor Sinan Aral to study WhatsApp's monetization. His assessment was blunt: "I would consider it close to a failure."
But Aral also believed this was about to change. "You will see the WhatsApp-monetization spigot get turned on like you have not seen before, in the near future," he said.
The business model is converging from multiple directions. "Click to WhatsApp" advertising links, in which businesses pay to open a conversation thread with a potential customer, are growing across Facebook and Instagram. The WhatsApp Business API, launched in 2018, charges enterprises between half a cent and fifteen cents per conversation, depending on the type and country. More than 200 million people use the WhatsApp Business app. In 2023, WhatsApp launched Channels — a broadcast feature for brands and celebrities — in the Updates tab, which now also carries advertising.
Mark Zuckerberg has twelve million followers on his WhatsApp Channel.
In Brazil, L'Oréal's virtual beauty assistants contact customers through WhatsApp links, run personalized conversations about their mothers for a Lancôme campaign, and convert abandoned shopping carts at six times the rate of email. "That's where we're really able to solve the doubt," said Alan Spector, L'Oréal Brazil's chief digital officer. In 2026, L'Oréal plans to introduce Beauty Genius, a fully AI-powered sales agent, on WhatsApp.
We hear from a lot of people in countries where WhatsApp is particularly popular that messaging a business can be the easiest way to get something done. It's certainly better than e-mail. It's better than calling and waiting on hold. You don't need a separate app.
Cathcart described a user's journey into WhatsApp's commercial zone — checking a celebrity Channel, posting a Status, browsing ads — as "progressive disclosure." An "ability to kind of go into the app as far as you want to. But you don't have to." The metaphor is spatial. The chat tab is the living room. The Updates tab is the shopping mall. The question is whether users will accept a shopping mall in the building where they keep their diary.
Meta AI — the company's chatbot, powered by its Llama large language model — appeared in WhatsApp conversations as a glowing multicolored ring about a year ago. Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp's head of product, said people were engaging with Meta AI on WhatsApp more than on any of Meta's other platforms. "The way that you interact with A.I. these days is a chat," she said. "It's so intuitive." Brouwer said it was only a matter of time before AI chatbots joined WhatsApp groups. "A lot of my conversations day-to-day are now within A.I. These worlds are going to combine at some point."
There's a detail worth noting: WhatsApp chats with Meta AI are not end-to-end encrypted. The most private messaging platform in the world is introducing an unencrypted conversational partner into the most intimate spaces of human communication. "If you don't have those constraints," Brouwer joked, "life becomes a lot easier."
The Leap
Zuckerberg told analysts in Q2 2024 that WhatsApp had crossed 100 million monthly active users in the United States for the first time — a milestone in a market that had long been the app's conspicuous weakness, owing to the unusual dominance of iPhones and iMessage. "The United States punches above its weight in terms of — it's such a large percent of our revenue," Zuckerberg said. "All of the work that we're doing to grow the business opportunity over time is just going to have a big tailwind if the U.S. ends up being a big market."
The U.S. expansion changes the calculus. Meta's North American users generate dramatically more revenue per user than users anywhere else — the U.S. and Canada accounted for 38% of Meta's total $39 billion quarterly revenue in Q2 2024 — and WhatsApp has historically had almost no presence in that market. Every American WhatsApp user is worth multiples of a user in Indonesia or India.
Brouwer, who also leads WhatsApp's growth team, articulated the emerging identity: "The place for people I care most about, but also then the place for information I care most about. This is much more nascent. But that's kind of the idea." He wasn't entirely convincing.
The French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, writing in the 1940s, described an emerging "noosphere" — a "mechanized envelope" of humans and machines circling the Earth, creating new thoughts and emotions. "With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think otherwise than collectively." Brouwer was once asked if he ever thought about WhatsApp as a vehicle for global consciousness. "It's a pertinent question," he replied. "We talk about it a lot. We think about it. I don't think anybody has the answer, other than this is something that is happening."
Some societies, Brouwer observed, are already much further along in their WhatsApp progression. "There's countries that just run on WhatsApp. Everything is done on WhatsApp. It feels a lot closer there. I think the leap is actually not that far."
On May 10, 2020, during the pandemic lockdown in London, a woman named Polly stood at a hospital window, having just given birth to twin sons, looking down at the spring-lit street below. Her husband Sam and their two young daughters stood on the pavement, unable to enter, holding a care package of banana bread and herbs the children had picked from the garden. They found each other by WhatsApp.
[10/05/2020, 11:22:12] Polly: Are you on tower street
[10/05/2020, 11:22:18] Polly: I can see you! Look up!
