There are many proofs. (First proof) - Paul Koebe, Kontaktprobleme der konformen Abbildung, Ber. Verh. Sächs. Akad. Leipzig 88 (1936), 141–164 (German) (Thurston's rediscovery) - William P. Thurston and John W. Milnor, The Geometry and Topology of Three-Manifolds (Variational principle) - Yves Colin de Verdière, Un principe variationnel pour les empilements de cercles, Invent. Math. 104 (1991), no. 3, 655–669 (French). - Igor Rivin, Euclidean structures on simplicial surfaces and hyperbolic volume, Ann. of Math. 139 (1994), 553–580. - Alexander I. Bobenko and Boris A. Springborn, Variational principles for circle patterns and Koebe’s theorem, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 356 (2004), no. 2, 659–689. - (see also) Günter M. Ziegler, Convex polytopes: extremal constructions and f-vector shapes, Geometric Combinatorics, 2007, pp. 617–691. (An inductive proof ?) - Kenneth Stephenson, Introduction to Circle Packing: The theory of discrete analytic functions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. (I also recommend the following completion of the theorem) - Graham R. Brightwell and Edward R. Scheinerman, Representations of planar graphs, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 6 (1993), no. 2, 214–229.