Lauren Feiner

That’s what Zuckerberg tells the FTC attorney who’s questioning him now. Zuckerberg says he didn’t want to deal with the complexity of “any connection that they had to China.” Musical.ly went on to be acquired by China-based ByteDance, was rebranded to TikTok, and grew into a major Meta competitor, he says.

One of WhatsApp’s founders used Craigslist as an example of his ambitions for the messaging service, Zuckerberg testifies, calling the site a “lifestyle company.” And rather than buying WhatsApp to prevent its growth, Zuckerberg says he had to convince its founders to add social features post-acquisition. This cuts against the FTC’s theory that WhatsApp might have grown to challenge Meta’s dominance had it remained independent or under different ownership.

Zuckerberg considered that WhatsApp could pivot its messaging platform into a “formidable competitor” to Facebook until he got to know its founders. “It became completely clear” they would never add the kind of features necessary to do that, he testifies, because they actually “looked down” on such things. “It’s hard to really express the kind of disdain that they had” for what other messaging apps were doing at the time, he says.

But he points out that the largest platforms today have had the backing of larger companies with massive infrastructure, like Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok. “Could I say it would have been impossible for them to do it without us? Obviously not. I mean, we did it,” he says. “But does it seem like it would have been likely?” Definitely not, he says.

Instagram’s growth was never preordained, Zuckerberg says, and the app benefited from Meta’s investment to get to the massive reach it has today. At the time of the deal in 2012, Zuckerberg hoped to grow Instagram from 10 million to 100 million users. It reached a billion users by 2018. Had Meta not bought Instagram, Zuckerberg says, “it’s very hard to know” how things would have turned out. That’s a key challenge for the FTC to address.

The CEO is challenging one of the core arguments of the FTC’s case: Meta’s alleged intent to grow its monopoly power by taking out rivals. “Was the intent to stop offering or stop making Instagram good? Absolutely not,” he testifies.

This old Andy Grove quote is how Zuckerberg describes his mindset toward competition. He says it has been interesting to look back on all the things he was worried about that never materialized the way he expected. One example is Dropbox, which he saw as an “upstream” feature that could eventually become competitive based on its photo storage offerings. “I was focused on things that ended up being so different,” he says.

Zuckerberg says network effects — where more users on a platform makes it better — are not always a good thing, even though the FTC says they’ve grown Meta’s power. He’s previously worried about this so much he’s considered resetting users’ Facebook friends. After accumulating friends over time, users might “wake up one day five years later” and realize they’re following people they no longer care about, he says. But AI recommendations have helped solve for this.

We’ve seen a lot of old emails over the past couple of days where Zuckerberg has expressed frustration and a sense of urgency to catch up with rivals that seem to be on Meta’s heels. He’s spinning these documents as a function of his own competitive spirit. “You can bet that I’m not going to rest until we do quite a bit better than where we’re at now,” he testifies about today’s competition with TikTok.

We’re getting started with day three of Meta’s antitrust trial with some controversy. A Snap attorney complains to Judge Boasberg that Meta released slides with inadvertently flawed redactions. He also accuses Meta’s lead attorney of openly referencing Snap’s competitive assessments that should have been private.