Let’s do something fun. Let’s count money! And boy, is it a lot of money. In this post, we would like to try and pinpoint as close as we can to its exact current value. As you may or may not know/remember, Facebook paid 1 billion USD for Instagram back in 2012. Since then, Instagram grew exponentially. And so did its value. Estimates vary, but if it was still an independent, publicly-traded company, its market cap could be more than Ford, AMD, Boeing even. But how much exactly?

How much is Instagram worth exactly?

Back in 2018, Bloomberg made an estimation that with 500 million users, Instagram could be valued at somewhere near 100 billion USD.

No one has valued the company since then, but since it has twice as many users as it did in 2018, you could say that the value could be a lot more than those aforementioned 100 billion. 

If we look at the parent company of Instagram – Facebook, it is a publicly-traded company. This means that its value can be calculated by looking at the market cap. Facebook has a market cap of around 730 billion USD (accurate as of August 2020). Instagram makes up around 30% of the total user-count of all Facebook Inc. social media platforms. So, we could speculate that it is responsible for approximately 30% of the total value of the company. Sounds reasonable enough, right?

So, 30% from 730 billion USD can mean that Instagram may be worth around 219 billion USD today.

This means that Facebook made an amazing investment back in 2012. It allowed them to receive an enormous 219-times return on their initial spending. If our estimates are close to the truth, Instagram would be in the TOP 25 of the world’s largest companies by market cap if it were public. The social media giant would position itself above Netflix, AT&T and Adobe, while remaining slightly lower than PayPal, Bank of America and Disney.