In the days ahead of an antitrust trial he was trying to avoid, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered $1 billion to the Federal Trade Commission — up from $450 million — to settle the case that centered on Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The FTC, however, was seeking $30 billion and wouldn't take anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree, the Journal reported.
In the negotiations to end the case, Zuckerberg told FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson that he was confident that President Donald Trump would support him with the FTC, the Journal reported. Further, Zuckerberg had been pressing Trump to intervene in the monopoly lawsuit, according to the report.
Instead, the trial kicked off Monday with Zuckerberg testifying for four hours, and he was back on the witness stand again Tuesday to defend against the FTC's accusations that he bought Instagram for $1 billion in order to "neutralize" a competitor.
"Mark bought his way out of competing, so I'm not surprised that he thinks he can buy his way out of law enforcement, too," former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal. "His proposed remedy, like his market strategy, is: 'let my illegal monopoly keep monopolizing.'"
White House aides told the Journal that Zuckerberg had been "relentless" in his pursuit to have Trump intervene on his behalf, going to the White House three times this year and donating $1 million to his inauguration.
In a meeting on April 8, however, Ferguson met with Trump and others in the Oval Office and received the president's blessing to move forward with the trial, the Journal reported.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg defended his conglomerate Meta against accusations it took over Instagram and WhatsApp to devour budding competitors. Zuckerberg sidestepped commenting on the role of competitive pressure, instead playing up the ability of Facebook to improve features, user numbers and revenue.
"Instagram integration ended up going very well; we were able to add way more value to Instagram than we would have expected," Zuckerberg testified. "After that, we basically felt more confident that we could identify other social apps, potentially acquire them and grow them faster (than they would have on their own)."
Central to the FTC's case is Facebook's 2012 billion-dollar purchase of Instagram — then a small but promising photo-sharing app that now boasts 2 billion active users.
An email from Zuckerberg cited by the FTC showed him depicting Instagram's emergence as "really scary," adding that is "why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this."
Information from AFP was used in this report.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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