Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram in 2018 in anticipation of a potential antitrust suit, documents unveiled at a trial in Washington showed on Tuesday.
“While most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up,” he wrote in an email at the time. He said there was a “there is a non-trivial chance” his company would be forced to spin Instagram and WhatsApp out anyway.
Zuckerberg made another key concession during the US trial on Tuesday, saying he bought Instagram because it had a “better” camera than the one Facebook was trying to build for its flagship app at the time. In the email, he said Instagram was a “rapidly growing, threatening, network”.
The acknowledgement appeared to bolster allegations by US antitrust enforcers that Meta had used a “buy or bury” strategy to snap up potential rivals, keep smaller competitors at bay and maintain an illegal monopoly.
It came during Zuckerberg’s second day testifying at the high-stakes trial in Washington, in which the US Federal Trade Commission is seeking to undo Meta’s acquisitions of prized assets Instagram, acquired for $1bn, and WhatsApp, bought for $19bn.
The case, filed during Donald Trump’s first term, is widely seen as a test of the new Trump administration’s promises to take on big tech companies.
Asked by an attorney for the FTC whether he thought fast-growing Instagram could be destructive to Meta, then known as Facebook, Zuckerberg said he believed Instagram had a better camera product than Facebook was building.
“We were doing a build versus buy analysis” while in the process of building a camera app, Zuckerberg said. “I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
Zuckerberg also acknowledged that many of the company’s attempts at building its own apps had failed.
“Building a new app is hard, and many more times than not, when we have tried to build a new app, it hasn’t gotten a lot of traction,” Zuckerberg told the court. “We probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company and the majority of them don’t go anywhere.”
Zuckerberg’s testimony comes as Meta is defending itself years after the release of damning statements plucked from Facebook’s own documents, like a 2008 email in which he said “it is better to buy than compete”.
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The company argues that his past intentions are irrelevant because the FTC has defined the social media market inaccurately and failed to account for stiff competition Meta has faced from ByteDance’s TikTok, Alphabet’s YouTube and Apple’s messaging app.
The FTC accuses Meta of holding a monopoly on platforms used to share content with friends and family, where its main competitors in the United States are Snap’s Snapchat and MeWe, a tiny privacy-focused social media app launched in 2016.
Platforms where users broadcast content to strangers based on shared interests, such as X, TikTok, YouTube and Reddit, are not interchangeable, the FTC argues.
