Alex Heath

Mark Zuckerberg ends this chunk of his testimony by discussing where he sees the tech industry headed. He sees the rise of “increasingly immersive content” beyond video and says, “we’re just about due for this next major transition” to smart glasses that blend “the physical and digital world together.” The goal of Meta’s lead attorney here is clearly to paint the company, and Zuckerberg specifically, as an innovator. Judge Boasberg seems engaged.

A smile flashed across his face when Meta’s lead attorney, Mark Hansen, asked if he was “happy” with the $19 billion he paid for WhatsApp in 2014. Hansen showed the courtroom a deck prepared for Meta’s board around the time of the acquisition, which projected that WhatsApp could reach 2 billion users by 2024. The app has nearly 3 billion users now, Zuckerberg testifies. He says monetization is early but expects AI to accelerate the company’s business of charging brands to interact with their customers via WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg is talking about how quickly platforms can go viral. He mentions ChatGPT’s recent image generation upgrade and that “I think they’ve added hundreds of millions of people to their service” as a result. Maybe he read our scoop from yesterday that OpenAI is now working on its own social network.

The Meta CEO is back on the witness stand for the third day of trial. His lead lawyer for the case, Mark Hansen, kicks things off by asking about the impact of TikTok. “We observed that our growth slowed down dramatically” with TikTok’s rise, Zuckerberg says.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Mark Zuckerberg called FTC chair Andrew Ferguson and initially offered $450 million before upping the offer to settle to $1 billion. Ferguson apparently wouldn’t initially settle for “anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree” before the FTC upped its counter to $30 billion, per the report. The Journal also notes that President Trump “at various points appeared more open to striking a deal ” and asked “questions about how a settlement would work.”

He was on the stand for roughly 6 hours. The day focused mostly on how Instagram and WhatsApp fared after they were acquired, followed by Zuckerberg teaching his version of Social Media 101 to the court in the afternoon. We got the spicy memo from 2018 in which he suggested spinning off Instagram, but otherwise, there weren’t any big bombshells today.

In October 2013, Zuckerberg wrote to his executive team that they should be prepared for news that he offered $6 billion to acquire Snapchat — a project internally called “Sasquatch.” That price tag never leaked, though his willingness to pay $3 billion for the company that year was widely covered at the time.