April 18, 2025 – During a high-profile antitrust lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Meta, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg defended his company’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, asserting that these moves were not aimed at stifling competition.
The FTC’s lawsuit alleges that Zuckerberg’s decision to acquire WhatsApp was driven by concerns over the messaging app’s potential to evolve into a full-fledged social media platform, posing a direct threat to Facebook’s market dominance. In his testimony, Zuckerberg acknowledged that he had indeed considered the FTC’s perspective but, after engaging with WhatsApp’s founders, concluded that the likelihood of the app competing with Facebook was minimal.
Zuckerberg further argued that WhatsApp’s early user growth signaled a broader shift in how people preferred to communicate online, moving away from public platforms like Facebook towards more private messaging services. He maintained that Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp was a strategic move to align with this evolving user behavior, rather than an attempt to undermine competitors. Additionally, Zuckerberg revealed that Meta generates approximately $10 billion annually from advertising, which facilitates user interactions with businesses across its suite of applications.
Regarding Instagram, the FTC cited internal emails suggesting that Zuckerberg’s motivation for acquiring the photo-sharing platform was to “neutralize a competitor.” Zuckerberg countered this claim by stating that, at the time of the acquisition, Instagram had around 10 million users, and he had no intention of stifling competition. It was only years later, as Instagram’s user base swelled to 1 billion, that Zuckerberg expressed concerns about potential rivalry with Facebook. He also posited that Instagram would have been “highly unlikely” to achieve its current level of success had it not been acquired by Meta.
