Zuckerberg had already tried this before—unsuccessfully, back in 2008, when Twitter CEO Ev Williams had indicated he would accept an offer worth about $500 million. But then Williams got cold feet, and now Twitter was a major competitor. Zuckerberg was upset about the outcome, but had done the same thing himself once. In 2006, when Facebook was about Instagram’s age, Yahoo! had offered him $1 billion. He went against the advice of his board and said no, confident that he could build Facebook to be bigger on his own. Zuckerberg derived much of his confidence from that pivotal moment of
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