According to a new book written by Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin called “Stealing MySpace”, MySpace failed to acquire Facebook for $75 million back in February of 2005. Mike Arrington, who has access to a draft copy of the book also states that toward the end of 2005, the two companies met again, at which time Mark Zuckerberg requested $750 million, nearly ten times what he previously asked for only a few months earlier.

Facebook’s sky-rocketing popularity has resulted in numerous failed acquisitions. Mark Zuckerberg famously rejected a $1 billion offer from Yahoo! back in July of 2006 after then CEO, Terry Semel tried to renegotiate down to $800 million. By 2008 Mark Zuckerberg was touting a new investment by Microsoft which valued the company at a whopping $15 billion.

While industry experts scoff at the Microsoft valuation, suggesting that it wasn’t based on any sort of numbers, Mark Zuckerberg has clearly lucked out as each failed negotiation results in a higher valuation for the company. How many times can Mark Zuckerberg double down though? So far the game appears to be working out for the company. If everything keeps on track, Facebook could have 20 percent of the world internet population on their site by the end of this year (based on Internet World Stats).

MySpace must be hating the fact that they failed to acquire the company for $75 million back at the beginning of 2005, but then again hindsight is always 20/20. Also at the time, $75 million would have been a ludicrous amount since they had nowhere near the number of users they have now (probably less than 10 million at the time). One thing that is clear in the history of Facebook is that Mark Zuckerberg has lucked out on numerous occasions.

Facebook would most likely not have built the platform they have today had it not been for the multiple failed Facebook acquisitions. If the Facebook platform was never developed, the social networking landscape would be a whole lot different today.