Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C., for a second day on Tuesday, testifying about his intentions for acquiring Instagram in 2012.
In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sued Facebook, which is now under the umbrella of parent company Meta, alleging it was in violation of antitrust laws by buying both Instagram and WhatsApp.
FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson pressed Zuckerberg on Tuesday over his internal message exchanges from 2012 with then-Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman regarding the $1 billion bid for Instagram.
Daniel Matheson, a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, departs following the first day of a historic antitrust trial about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions in acquiring Instagram, at Barrett Prettyman U.S. Court House in Washington, Monday, April 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)
“[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 to Ebersman, then agreeing with the chief financial officer when he said the purchase of Instagram would be a way to “neutralize a potential competitor.”
Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand on Monday at a high-stakes trial in Washington over U.S. antitrust enforcers’ claims that the company spent billions of dollars to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp to fend off Facebook competitors.
The FTC is seeking to force Meta to restructure or sell Instagram and WhatsApp, testing President Donald Trump’s promises to take on Big Tech while posing an existential threat to a company that by some estimates earns about half of its U.S. advertising revenue from Instagram.
The FTC and social media giant Meta make their opening statements as the first big antitrust trial of Trump’s second term gets underway in Judge James E. Boasberg’s courtroom.
Meta Platforms (META) is going to federal court today for a long-awaited antitrust trial that will force the tech giant to defend its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta stock was ahead slightly in early trading.
The $1.4 trillion market cap social media titan is accused by the Federal Trade Commission of abusing monopoly power to acquire photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp more than a decade ago. The FTC filed the original antitrust lawsuit in 2020 before it spent nearly five years winding through appeals and other motions in the courts.
