Facebook creator turns down $1.6 billon offer from Yahoo

  AT 22, Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is being labelled as the next Bill Gates. But even the Microsoft founder might have hesitated before blowing the chance of a $1.6 billion (£819m) offer for his fledgling business.

  Zuckerberg, founder of the Facebook social networking website, has told Yahoo!, the internet giant, that $1 billion is not enough to sell out. Now leaked documents suggest that Yahoo! was willing to raise its bid to $1.6 billion.

  Facebook, which he launched as a service for Harvard students in 2004, has become the seventh busiest website on the internet, and with 13m users is the second biggest social network in America.

  Yahoo!s $1.6 billion valuation of Facebook assumed that its rapid growth would continue until 2015, according to documents leaked to TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley blog.

  However, Yahoo! has been overtaken by Google in terms of profit and market value and is struggling after a difficult year.

Source: Times Online