WhatsApp Co-Founder Jan Koum Leaving After Clashing With Facebook
Image by wikipedia
(JTA) — WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum will leave the company over conflicts with Facebook, which bought the messaging service four years ago.
Koum, a Jewish billionaire originally from Ukraine, reportedly also will leave Facebook’s board of directors, according to The Washington Post, which cited people familiar with internal discussions. His date of departure has not been set.
Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 million in 2014.
It is believed that Koum is leaving due to disagreement with Facebook over the privacy of user data and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, though Facebook has not confirmed this.
Koum, 42, who is worth more than $9 billion, moved to California with his grandmother and mother at the age of 16.
In a Facebook post Monday, Koum said “it is time for me to move on.”
He also wrote: “I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee. And I’ll still be cheering WhatsApp on – just from the outside.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, responded in a comment: “I will miss working so closely with you. I’m grateful for everything you’ve done to help connect the world, and for everything you’ve taught me, including about encryption and its ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people’s hands. Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
