Mark Zuckerberg thought he’d done everything in his power to make the government’s antitrust case against Meta go away.
He’d paid $1 million into Donald Trump’s inaugural fund. He’d settled a lawsuit the president launched over being blackballed by Facebook for a whopping $25 million. He sat in Trump’s box at the inauguration and shuttled between the White House and Mar-a-Lago to ingratiate himself with his new friend.
And what did he get for all his trouble? A deafening silence from the one person who could help him as the days ticked down to the antitrust trial that threatens to tear his company apart.
Facebook was accused by the Federal Trade Commission of paying $1 billion to buy Instagram and effectively “neutralize” a key competitor.
The offer on the table from the FTC was $30 billion to settle and avoid a trial.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg offered an initial $450 million and later upped it to $1 billion. On a call, he was said to be confident he had Trump’s backing.
But at an April 8 Oval Office meeting between the president, chief of staff Susie Wiles, new FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, and their antitrust advisers, Trump reportedly agreed to let the case go to trial.
Dressed in a dark suit, his curly hair grown out, Zuckerberg was forced to appear in the U.S. District Court in Washington on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to defend himself against allegations he used a “buy or bury” strategy to crush competition.
In a monotone, the tech billionaire answered questions about the motivation for his purchases of Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp. Former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom are expected to follow him into the witness box.
“TikTok is still bigger than either Facebook or Instagram, and I don’t like it when our competitors do better than us,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.
The case is being adjudicated by Judge James Boasberg. If he rules that Meta broke the law, the government is planning to seek the breakup of the company.
Ominously, FTC spokesperson Joe Simonson said before the case started that “the Trump–Vance FTC could not be more ready for this trial.”
The issue, reports the Journal, is that MAGA never bought Zuckerberg’s sucking up to Trump.
While the Facebook boss insists that $400 million he gave for “election infrastructure” in 2020 was nonpartisan, MAGA supporters claimed it helped boost Democratic Party turnout and led to their leader’s defeat to Joe Biden.
That theory seems to have some consensus in the FTC, as Ferguson told Fox Business on Monday that Meta’s acquisitions gave it “a tremendous amount of power, power we all saw on full display in 2020.”
“And so that’s what this case is about, is about addressing the power of Meta and making sure that the situation we had in 2020 can never arise again,” he added.
The Journal report says the lowest amount Ferguson would accept in settlement from Zuckerberg was $18 billion.
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