At the end of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony at the DC Court House, a smile shone on his face.
Matta’s lead attorney, Mark Hanson, asked the CEO whether he was “happy” about the Billion 19 billion payment to WhatsApp in 2014.
Zuckerberg shone a smile, took a short break, and replied, “I’ll do it again.”
Over the past decade, the growing scale of Instagram and WhatsApp made Meta a cement as one of the most powerful companies in the Earth. Now, the US government, a Federal Trade Commission, is trying to open these acquisitions through a trial launched on April 14, through a law legislature. Zuckerberg spent about 13 hours in three days to answer questions from FTC and Meta Lawyers. Most of the time on Wednesday was dedicated to trying to deny a basic argument: that he bought both apps to buy and not to improve them.
The FTC claims that the WhatsApp was obtained because Zuckerberg and his executives were upset at the time that private messaging apps would be fully involved in the social media business. From the witness’s position, Zuckerberg admitted that it was “what I thought about”, but he thought it would be “unlikely” to compete with Facebook after meeting his two co -founders, John Kum and Brian Acton for the WhatsApp.
He said it was “difficult to express hatred” that the two men had kept for social media and advertising, and that after the acquisition, it was the ones who gradually urged them to add more social features like stories to the WhatsApp. The court was shown an e -mail explaining the preliminary meeting between Zuckerberg and Kum, in which Zuckerberg told colleagues that he was considered “unhealthy” and that, shortly before Facebook received it, the WhatsApp “was not trying to expand in different things.”
According to Zuckerberg, the early height of WhatsApp represented the change that people were talking online, when the talks were starting to go away from public levels like Facebook News Feed, such as Facebook News Feed, and private chat threads. He was willing to pay a record money for the WhatsApp because he saw Facebook as a “valuable” asset to help naive this change. He also saw WhatsApp as “leverage” for his strained relationship with Apple and Google.
“We are always worried about messing with us with us,” Zuckerberg said about the two witness stand companies. ” He explained that through his app stores “we rely on them for partition”, and he believed that buying WhatsApp would give him more negotiation power if he needed to withdraw from some store policies. (“I’m not sure how much he helped in reality,” he rightly confessed.)
At the time of the acquisition of the WhatsApp, an internal deck made for the Facebook Board of Directors predicted that 2 billion users will be targeted in this app by 2024. In court, Zuckerberg revealed that WhatsApp now has about 3 billion users, and that Meta makes $ 10 billion a year, which sends people to communicate with business on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
Instagram was more directly rival Facebook in some ways, and the government has claimed with the support of internal emails that Zuckerberg has purchased the app to “neutralize” it.
During his testimony, Zuckerberg said he was “not worried” about competing with Facebook about Instagram until he reached 1 billion users years after buying it. After fearing that Instagram would remove the engagement from Facebook, he instructed the Instagram team to rely less on the feature integration with Facebook for traffic.
According to Zuckerberg, Instagram co -founders, Kevin Sistrom and Mike Craiger did not react to the “super positive” directive. Both of them immediately to the company. He left, though Zuckerberg had mentioned several times that Sistrom had predicted Instagram for more than years.
While examining both the FTC and the Meta’s legal team, Zuckerberg emphasized the resources provided to Instagram to help fight the app and help its operations. The court saw the internal documents showing that when Instagram was acquired, there were barely 10 million users. Zuckerberg predicted that it was “unlikely” that the app itself would succeed. When Instagram was purchased, he and the target of reaching Sistom 100 million users. Now it has more than 2 billion users.
Overall, Zuckerberg’s last day on the Witness Stand, as a Instagram and WhatsApp investment, has been accused by the FTC of cement monopoly.
On the end of the day, the former Meta Shrill Sandberg was called to testify. He was asked about an email that he wrote to Zuckerberg at the time of a $ 1 billion Instagram acquisition in which he said he was playing a “too much way”.
“I think I was wrong,” he said on Wednesday. “Like, very wrong.”
