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"Research and development at the start-up, which employed just 55 people at the time it was sold, totaled $77 million"

I'm super-confused by this, can anyone explain what sorts of expenses would be this high and labeled as R&D costs for a company like WhatsApp?

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Probably taxes. There are non-trivial tax credits for R&D spending. My guess is they shoehorned as much of their costs into R&D as they could. You can see they got 1.2 million in R&D credits in 2013 in the referenced document.

Right. It's SOP for tech companies to list basically all of engineering as R&D for tax purposes.

From what we've seen Facebook acquisitions move over to the Facebook infrastructure.

That could mean bringing in expensive consultants to assist.

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