Facebook may not have succeeded at buying Snapchat, but the social network giant surprised everyone by acquiring WhatsApp for a whopping $19 billion USD - a figure exceeding more than a year of NASA funding, 76 Washington Posts, and the entire world music industry.

To help us understand the acquisition, business insurance provider Simply Business has released this interactive visualization that compares the acquisition strategies of five tech giants over the last 15 years.

These "Hungry Tech Giants," as they're called here, are Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. These companies consume company after company, represented by colorful bubbles like constellations in capitalism's infinite skies. Each bubble's size represents the price paid for the startup, if it was disclosed.

Surprisingly, the most expensive acquisition in that 15-year period by any of these companies were way cheaper than WhatsApp: Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012.

Some trends were also clearer: In recent years, it was social media, mobile, and hardware acquisitions that have become more coveted, while the popularity of search, media, and advertising waned.

See the full map here.