Zuck Offered FTC $1B To Avoid Trial Threatening His Social Media Empire: Report

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) nearly $1 billion to keep a case out of court that could break up his social media empire.

Zuckerberg sat for a third day of testimony on Wednesday in an antitrust case brought against his company by the FTC, which is attempting to force Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp over what the government has said are Meta’s anticompetitive business practices.

Zuckerberg called the head of the FTC, Chairman Andrew Ferguson, in March to try to settle the case out of court. Zuckerberg initially offered the agency $450 million, but later increased that offer to nearly $1 billion to avoid bringing the case to court. Ferguson rejected the offers, which were far below the $18 billion payment and consent decree that he offered Meta, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Meta founder has also courted President Donald Trump in recent months to try to avoid the trial in which Zuckerberg has begun to testify. The social media mogul donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and settled a lawsuit for $25 million over a Facebook ban on Trump after January 6, 2021 – the lion’s share of that settlement went toward Trump’s presidential library.

Meta’s head found himself in court on Monday despite those efforts. Government attorneys say that Meta has used illegal anticompetitive practices to buy up its competition, namely Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 in a nearly $22 billion deal. The FTC says that Meta has bought out competitors and now illegally dominates the “personal social-networking” market.

Meta has said that the FTC’s definition of the market is arbitrary and too narrow, and it ignores other major competitors of the tech giant. According to the FTC, Meta’s major competitors are Snapchat and an app called MeWe. Meta has said that it also competes with YouTube, TikTok, and X, among other companies not included in the FTC’s definition.

During the trial, Meta has argued that the growth of TikTok has been a major barrier to Meta’s own development. Meta has also said that an outage at TikTok earlier this year resulted in a bump in Instagram traffic, suggesting that Americans use the two platforms for similar purposes.

In public statements, Meta has complained about the Trump administration’s pursuit of it while appearing to treat TikTok, a Chinese-owned platform, more loosely by extending a pause on a congressionally approved ban on the app.