Washington: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seriously considered the possibility of spinning off Instagram in 2018 due to mounting concerns over potential antitrust scrutiny, according to internal company documents revealed during his testimony at a high-stakes trial in Washington.
The revelation came during Zuckerberg’s second day on the stand in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is seeking to unwind Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp—two of the company’s most valuable assets.
In a memo shown during the proceedings, Zuckerberg wrote, “I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company.” At the time, Meta—then known as Facebook—was exploring options to reorganize and more tightly integrate its suite of apps.
While acknowledging the business potential of such consolidation, Zuckerberg also warned of possible downsides, saying it could diminish the value of Facebook’s core social platform. He expressed uncertainty over whether Meta would be able to retain its “family of apps” in the long term.
Despite these internal concerns, Meta proceeded with the integration strategy in 2019 and did not spin off Instagram. However, the memo underscores the seriousness with which Zuckerberg viewed the risk of government intervention—a scenario that has now materialized.
In his memo, Zuckerberg also speculated on broader political and regulatory risks, writing, “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway,” referencing the possibility of antitrust actions under a future Democratic administration. “This is one more factor that we should consider since even if we wanted to keep those apps together we may not be able to,” he added.
The FTC ultimately filed suit against Meta in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term. That same year, Trump’s administration also initiated legal action against Google, alleging monopolistic behavior in its search business.
Zuckerberg’s memo downplayed the likely negative impact of a breakup, stating, “While most companies resist break ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up. The synergies are usually less than people think and the strategy tax is usually greater than people think.”
The CEO’s testimony also touched on prior internal communications, including a 2008 email in which he infamously said, “it is better to buy than compete.” The FTC has cited such statements as evidence of Meta’s alleged “buy or bury” strategy to eliminate potential threats.
The antitrust watchdog argues that Meta holds an illegal monopoly over social platforms used to connect with friends and family. Its main U.S.-based competitors—Snapchat and the smaller, privacy-centric MeWe—are not sufficient rivals, the FTC claims. Platforms like X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, which focus on broadcasting to broader audiences, are not interchangeable in this context, the agency argues.
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Zuckerberg pushed back on the FTC’s narrative, testifying that Meta acquired Instagram because it was technically superior in some respects. “We were doing a build vs. buy analysis” while in the process of building a camera app, he said. “I thought that Instagram was better at that, so I thought it was better to buy them.”
He also admitted that many of Meta’s own development efforts had fallen short. “Building a new app is hard and many more times than not when we have tried to build a new app, it hasn’t gotten a lot of traction,” he said. “We probably tried building dozens of apps over the history of the company and the majority of them don’t go anywhere.”
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Meta’s legal defense rests in part on its assertion that the FTC is inaccurately defining the market and underestimating the competitive threats it faces from TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s messaging platforms.
The outcome of this case is seen as a key test of the Trump administration’s ongoing promise to rein in Big Tech.
