Manuel Orbegozo/REUTERS
It’s been over a decade since Snapchat turned down a multibillion-dollar buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg — and the tech titan still doesn’t seem over it.
The failed acquisition bid was highlighted on Tuesday while Zuckerberg was on the witness stand for a second day of testimony in Meta’s blockbuster antitrust trial.
Zuckerberg’s Meta, then called Facebook, offered to buy the photo-messaging app Snapchat for $6 billion in 2013 just two years after its launch, according to an email from Zuckerberg revealed at the trial.
It was widely reported at the time that Snapchat rejected a $3 billion takeover attempt from Facebook.
“I delivered the offer to Evan and he seemed to take it well,” Zuckerberg wrote in an October 2013 email to other company executives, referring to Snapchat cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel. “He told me he thought he could get it done and that he’d call me back quickly.”
Zuckerberg continued in the email, “At this point, we should probably prepare for it to leak that we offered $6b for them and all the negative that will come from that.”
While under questioning by a Federal Trade Commission attorney on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he thought Snapchat “wasn’t growing at the potential that it could” and believed he could make it better.
“For what it’s worth, I think if we would had bought them we would have accelerated their growth, but that’s just speculation,” Zuckerberg testified in a Washington, DC, federal courtroom.
The US government introduced the email to try to bolster its argument that Zuckerberg’s Meta sought to maintain its dominance in the social media market through acquisitions rather than competition.
During his testimony, Zuckerberg said Snapchat “was and is a meaningful competitor.”
When asked about Zuckerberg’s comments on how he says he could have improved the app, Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy told Business Insider: “Anticompetitive behavior can often slow and thwart growth for smaller companies and startups, especially when dominant companies like Meta use their size and position to stifle competition.”
“Public reports of Meta’s attempt to buy Snap, and then egregiously copy its features, was an attempt to do just that,” Bellamy said.
The spokesperson added, “Nonetheless, Snap has remained a popular and a viable competitor to companies like Meta because we’ve continued to innovate and build products and services that people find useful and fun.”
In response, a Meta spokesperson told BI, “As Snap has repeatedly acknowledged, they operate in fierce competition with us and many others, and this competition drives innovation across the full ecosystem to improve features that benefit consumers.”
“But the core issue of this case is not this — it’s the FTC’s claims we don’t compete against TikTok, YouTube and many others with the same features,” the spokesperson said.
The antitrust trial between Meta and the FTC opened on Monday and is expected to run up to eight weeks.
The FTC argues in its case against Meta that the tech empire “helped cement” its illegal monopoly in the social media market with its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and its $19 billion acquisition of the messaging app WhatsApp two years later.
The government says these acquisitions were part of Meta’s “buy or bury” strategy to maintain market dominance and stamp out competitive threats.
Meta could be forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp if the judge overseeing the case rules in the FTC’s favor.
The tech giant argues that there is no monopoly and that the company faces massive competition from apps like TikTok and YouTube.
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