A Billion Dollars Was Already on the Table

In the summer of 2006, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg verbally agreed to sell Facebook to Yahoo for a billion dollars — then watched the deal disintegrate over four weeks as Yahoo's CEO panicked after a catastrophic earnings report and cut his own offer by two hundred and fifty million dollars. This episode reconstructs that sequence in detail: who held the power, who was in the room, who was calling from outside it, and what the board pressure actually looked like when the moment came.

The four beats here are tightly knotted. The decision moment produced a dissent story that runs in two directions simultaneously — Thiel and Breyer pushing Zuckerberg to sell, Andreessen pulling him to hold. And then there's the counterfactual question, which this episode treats as an empirical one rather than a speculative one: given Yahoo's acquisition record going into 2006, was there any plausible world in which Facebook thrived inside Yahoo? The Overture autopsy and the Flickr case both speak directly to that.