Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand for a second day Tuesday in a landmark antitrust trial that could break up the company that brought social networking to billions of people globally.
The federal court trial in Washington, D.C., started Monday despite repeated efforts by Zuckerberg and the company he co-founded to persuade the Trump Administration to ease enforcement of antitrust law against Big Tech.
The government contends Meta illegally solidified a monopoly by acquiring WhatsApp (for $19 billion in 2014) and Instagram ($1 billion in 2012) when they were small, threatening startups, and grafted them into then-Facebook. The purchases were part of a “buy-or-bury strategy,” claimed the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is likely to seek Meta divest Instagram and WhatsApp. Both companies have become staples of Meta and mushroomed into global powerhouses since their acquisitions. [The case was brought by the FTC in 2020 during the final days of the first Trump administration.]
FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson asserted in the court that “consumers do not have reasonable alternatives” to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. But Zuckerberg, testifying before a packed courthouse, argued Meta’s market is far bigger and more competitive than the government suggested. Further, Zuckerberg dismissed the idea the Facebook was centered on friends, and instead the company had become “more of a broad discovery and entertainment space.”
An email from Zuckerberg, cited by the FTC, showed him depicting Instagram’s emergence as “really scary.” But Zuckerberg on Monday downplayed the comment as early chatter before plans for Instagram came together. He added that Meta had improved Instagram over the years. The FTC also charged Meta adopted the same stance before the WhatsApp acquisition — Zuckerberg feared the messaging app could either transform into a social network or be purchased by a competitor, the agency alleged.
“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” Matheson said in his opening statement at Monday’s trial.
Meta says there’s plenty of competition in social media, including from apps such as TikTok, X and YouTube.
The trial, which poses the most significant threat to Zuckerberg’s business empire, is the third major tech antitrust lawsuit in the past two years. Last year, the Department of Justice won its case against Alphabet Inc.’s Google for monopolizing internet search; a federal judge is set to hear remedies, including a potential breakup next week.
For now, Zuckerberg and Meta are in the legal fish bowl.
“The factual dispute on the first day of trial was between 2012 Mark Zuckerberg and 2025 Mark Zuckerberg. In 2012, Zuckerberg admitted to purchasing Instagram to ‘neutralize’ a rival that threatened Facebook’s growth. In 2025, the same Mark Zuckerberg would have us believe his 2012 counterpart was a liar,” said Lee Hepner, senior legal council at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Zuckerberg also seems to disagree with his own company’s rationale for existence. He repeatedly talked about Facebook and Instagram as platforms for connecting with family and friends, but would now have the judge believe that core use case never mattered. Could the real Mark Zuckerberg — and the real Facebook — please stand up?”
Alden Abbott, a former FTC General Counsel and current senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center, said, “Breaking up Facebook as the FTC proposes, would impose substantial harm on Facebook customers who enjoy the improvements the company has made in WhatsApp and Instagram, and, more broadly, would destroy the integrated platform experience Facebook has created.”
