However you can sell (transfer) a domain to others if you wish, which is probably what meta did.
You just know someone bought that domain hoping to turn it into a gangbusters online clothes retailer and the best they could manage to do is camp on it and sell it.
Could’ve been Bezos, instead was a bozo.
Were they a bozo, though? If they sold that domain to FB, there is a great chance they just banked like gangbusters.
I suppose it depends on your outlook. I’d rather have had the passive income over time paid in stock options that multiply in value that I can get interest free loans against to file tax losses than the one time payout you have to pay gains on.
Hindsight is 20/20
Edit to add: there’s also a non zero chance that Meta swooped in like Disney did to Central Florida, set up a secret shell company to buy the property under value so no one knows what big business is behind the acquisition.
Honestly, chances are godaddy sold it to them for a few hundred bucks.
Considering it was registered in 1995 (https://www.whois.com/whois/threads.com) you are correct in thinking that it should have already been registered.
However you can sell (transfer) a domain to others if you wish, which is probably what meta did.
You just know someone bought that domain hoping to turn it into a gangbusters online clothes retailer and the best they could manage to do is camp on it and sell it.
Could’ve been Bezos, instead was a bozo.
Were they a bozo, though? If they sold that domain to FB, there is a great chance they just banked like gangbusters.
I suppose it depends on your outlook. I’d rather have had the passive income over time paid in stock options that multiply in value that I can get interest free loans against to file tax losses than the one time payout you have to pay gains on.
Hindsight is 20/20
Edit to add: there’s also a non zero chance that Meta swooped in like Disney did to Central Florida, set up a secret shell company to buy the property under value so no one knows what big business is behind the acquisition.
Honestly, chances are godaddy sold it to them for a few hundred bucks.
If you're interested, you can see the past snapshots of thread.net in the wayback machine. This one from 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160111175229/http://thread.net/
Old primary word domains like this can cost millions to acquire.
Isn't this something else though? Meta's is .net isn't it? So even they couldn't get the .com...
edit: Indeed it's nothing to do with Meta, though it seems kinda related. Bit surprised Meta went with the name actually.
ah ye are right, I briefly checked out .com and it seemed to roughly match
.net was registered in 1997 so the same roughly still applies