In Meta's antitrust trial this week, Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Snapchat would have grown faster if he accepted his company's offer to buy social networks in 2013, Business Insider reports.
Court documents revealed that Meta, later called Facebook, had offered to buy Snapchat for $6 billion (reports at the time stated that the dollar amount was $3 billion). In response to a question from an FTC lawyer, Zuckerberg said he believes Snapchat “isn't increasing the likelihood” and believes his company has improved the app.
“As to what it's worth, I think if we had bought them we'd accelerated their growth, but that's just speculation,” Zuckerberg testified.
The government has raised failed takeover attempts in favor of the argument that Meta aims to maintain its advantage in the social media situation by acquiring rivals rather than directly compete.
The FTC aims to force Meta to rebuild or sell Instagram and WhatsApp, claiming it will spend billions of dollars on getting the app to dodge Facebook competitors and create an illegal monopoly.