Bill Cohan, Columnist

WhatsApp and the New Meaning of Work

By paying $19 billion for WhatsApp’s 55 employees, Facebook has crystallized why it's been so hard for the U.S. to climb out of the unemployment ditch dug by the financial crisis.

February 25, 2014 at 6:15 PM UTC

By Bill Cohan

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum is pocketing about $8.5 billion in Facebook's money. Photographer: Angel Navarette/Bloomberg — WhatsApp founder Jan Koum is pocketing about $8.5 billion in Facebook's money. Photographer: Angel Navarette/Bloomberg

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By paying $19 billion in cash and stock for WhatsApp Inc.'s 55 employees -- $345 million apiece -- Facebook Inc. has crystallized why it's been so difficult for the U.S. to climb out of the unemployment ditch dug by the 2008 financial crisis.

Hiring and nurturing lots of new employees is no longer a required, or even necessary, way to build a business in the Internet age, or to create wealth for owners, which, after all, is the reason businesses are started.