Facebook 

says it has wrapped up its landmark $19 billion acquisition of

WhatsApp, a deal that was hashed out in Mark Zuckerberg's house over the
course of a few days in February and sealed over a bottle of Jonnie
Walker scotch.

WhatsApp has continued to run its operation completely independently since

then, but the closing of the deal marks the start of a gradual integration as
Facebook gives the world's biggest mobile messaging service legal and
administrative support and -- eventually, we can presume -- finds new ways to
monetize the company it spent more than Iceland's GDP on.

WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton became billionaires last

February when Facebook announced it was buying the company they had
started five years ago for a jaw-dropping $19 billion. Having mostly shunned
venture capital investments till then the founders had kept large stakes. Koum
still had around 45% at the time of the deal, leaving the Ukrainian-born
immigrant to pocket $6.8 billion and former Yahoo engineer Acton with $3.5
billion after taxes. WhatsApp founder Jan Koum now gets a seat on the
Facebook board and will match Zuckerberg’s $1 salary.

Facebook will now award 177.8 million shares of its Class A common stock and
$4.59 billion in cash to WhatsApp’s shareholders, it said in an SEC filing over
the weekend, plus 45.9 million shares (restricted stock units) to WhatsApp's
employees to complete the deal.

Fortunately for those parties, the value of Facebook's shares are now higher
than they were when the deal was announced in February, notes Re/code’s
Peter Kafka, making the deal worth around $21.8 billion.

The acquisition has gone through a few regulatory hoops, but it passed the
final one last Friday when the European Union gave it the green light.

WhatsApp makes money by charging a $1 a year subscription in a handful of

countries that have clear carrier billing systems and where credit card
penetration is high, bringing in about $20 million in annual revenue,
according to Forbes' estimates. That's not enough to justify a $19 billion price
tag, so Facebook is almost certainly looking at other ways the messaging
service could make money.

WhatsApp is the most globally diverse messaging service, with more than 600
million monthly active users from Europe to South America to Asia, so some
kind of money transfer service for the world's increasingly globalized
workforce might be one way.

Facebook's interest in the field of money transfer is well known. In April

we reported that Facebook had been working since late 2013 on a European-
wide money-transfer and storage service. Two months later it hired PayPal
CEO David Marcus as head of the company's "Messaging Products." Then last
week screenshots tweeted by a Stanford computer science student showed
Facebook had already put elements of a payments infrastructure into place in
Messenger for iOS, which had yet to be activated.