Zuckerberg departs E. Barrett Prettyman United States Court House on April 14. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday wrapped up his second day in federal court by acknowledging that he worried about the competition from other apps and wasn't sure Facebook could compete well with its own products.
Why it matters: The FTC antitrust case alleges that Meta has illegally monopolized the social media market by acquiring the hugely successful Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago.
- The tech billionaire was confronted with a myriad of confidential internal emails and documents throughout the last two days before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
- During his time on the stand, Zuckerberg said he wasn't sure what he had in mind when he wrote certain emails or that the documents didn't show the full picture.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Zuckerberg's marathon testimony.
1. Zuckerberg feared other apps were threatening to Facebook's popularity.
- The FTC showed a 2012 email where Zuckerberg asked the CFO at the time, David Ebersman, how much they should be willing to pay for IG.
- "... Messenger isn't beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion," Zuckerberg wrote.
- When asked about this email on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said that "I think it's fair to read this as I'm not happy with that team's results. A billion dollars is very expensive."
- Court documents also showed how much Zuckerberg tried to buy Snapchat for in 2013: a whopping $6 billion.
2. Zuckerberg didn't think Facebook was building its own products well enough to compete.
- "I'm sure we could have built our own app," Zuckerberg said on Tuesday.
- "Whether it would have succeeded or not is a matter of speculation. Many more times than not when we tried to build a new app it hasn't gotten much traction."
3. Zuckerberg foresaw antitrust action, and considered spinning off Instagram.
- "As calls to break up the Big Tech companies grow, there is a non trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps Whatsapp in the next 5-10 years anyway," Zuckerberg wrote in a 2018 email to top executives.
- Spinning off Instagram would thwart potential antitrust scrutiny as well as IG's "cannibalization" of Facebook, which at the time Zuckerberg described as a "more engaging and more profitable product."
4. TikTok's explosion is looming over the FTC's case.
- In attempting to explain his thinking at the time, Zuckerberg told the court that his approach has evolved as new competition has sprung up.
- TikTok, YouTube and iMessage are Meta's biggest competitors, in that order, Zuckerberg said. He described TikTok as "a very intense ongoing competition."
- Zuckerberg said modern social networking is about discovering content, then sharing it on messaging apps: "I share just as much stuff from YouTube as I do from Reels."
The bottom line: The FTC is boxing Meta into a small ring of competitors. That makes it easier to argue Meta is dominating.
- That could be a tough sell as major new players have cropped up since the early 2000s and Meta pours billions into R&D to fight for an edge.
