By Naomi Nix · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg struggled in federal court Tuesday to defend his reasons for the Facebook owner’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram more than a decade ago – one of two acquisitions the Federal Trade Commission now contends was illegally anticompetitive.
FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson repeatedly pressed Zuckerberg to explain several internal messages he sent to other Facebook executives about a potential purchase of Instagram in 2012 indicating that he wanted to “neutralize” a competitor at a time when he thought his own company’s efforts to build a competing photo app were faltering.
During their combative exchange, Matheson presented Zuckerberg with internal communications about the potential Instagram acquisition in which the CEO is seen identifying Instagram’s superior photo capabilities as well as its rapidly growing network of users.
Zuckerberg sought to characterize those discussions as part of a larger “buy vs. build” analysis Meta was undergoing across the social media ecosystem, while admitting that acquiring a company “inherently means taking it off the market.”
The FTC first sued Facebook – now subsumed under parent company Meta – in 2020, arguing that it illegally acquired WhatsApp and Instagram as part of a larger strategy to buy and crush up-and-coming rivals. The agency contended the social media giant’s acquisitions caused the company to invest less in making Facebook a better product, while depriving users of other, more vibrant social media app options.
The FTC’s lawsuit is the latest effort by antitrust regulators to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley firms. Big Tech critics have argued that major internet platforms have become monopolies, throttling competition from new upstarts in the market and harming consumer choice.
If U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg sides with the FTC, Meta could be forced to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp, which have helped the company build a massive digital advertising business and laid the groundwork for its investments in artificial intelligence. Instagram is expected to represent slightly more than half of the company’s revenue from the American market in 2025, according to analytics firm eMarketer.
Matheson repeatedly sought Tuesday to compel Zuckerberg to confirm his own written analysis of why it was important to the company to buy Instagram. In one case, the lawyer presented the chief executive with a chain of messages he exchanged with the company’s then-chief financial officer, David Ebersman, in February 2012, weeks before the company bought Instagram.
“[What]I’ve been thinking about recently is how much we should be willing to pay to acquire mobile app companies like Instagram and Path that are building networks that are competitive with our own,” Zuckerberg wrote. He agreed when Ebersman asked whether he wanted to “neutralize a potential competitor.”
During a contentious exchange in court, Matheson said that in the run-up to the Instagram purchase, Zuckerberg never wrote that his motivation was “improving Instagram,” but often did write that “a motivation for the acquisition was a rapidly growing, threatening new network.”
“I’m not sure [what] the full mess of what I wrote” was, Zuckerberg said.
The FTC contends that Zuckerberg agreed to buy Instagram as Facebook’s own efforts to build a stand-alone camera app, code-named Snap, were struggling.
Matheson asked if it was fair to say Zuckerberg would have preferred that the Facebook camera app “would have grown quickly enough so that you didn’t have to buy Instagram for $1 billion?”
“I guess so,” Zuckerberg said. “A billion dollars is very expensive.”
