Key Points

• Meta offered $450M to settle an antitrust case, far less than the FTC’s $30B demand, centered on Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.

• Zuckerberg, who has cultivated ties with Trump, personally lobbied to avoid the FTC trial, but the FTC chair found the offer not credible.

• The FTC sued Meta in 2020, accusing it of stifling competition by acquiring startups. Meta denies the charges.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifying during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last year.

Mark Zuckerberg called the head of the Federal Trade Commission in late March with an offer: Meta would pay $450 million to settle a long-running antitrust case that was about to go to trial. 

The offer was far from the $30 billion that the FTC had demanded. It was also a fraction of the value of Instagram and WhatsApp, the two apps Meta had bought and were at the heart of the government’s case.

On the call, Zuckerberg sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC, said people familiar with the matter. The billionaire Facebook co-founder had been developing closer ties to Trump—his company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and settled a $25 million lawsuit—and had been pressing the president in recent weeks to intervene in the monopoly lawsuit.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible, and wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree. As the trial approached, Meta upped its offer to close to $1 billion, the people said, and Zuckerberg led a frenzied lobbying effort to avoid the FTC trial.

It wasn’t enough. On Monday, the trial kicked off. The FTC called Zuckerberg—who privately expressed reluctance about taking the stand—to testify for four hours.

Zuckerberg was back on the witness stand Tuesday, where he faced questioning from an FTC lawyer over whether Facebook had paid $1 billion to buy Instagram to “neutralize” a competitor. Asked if he would have preferred that Facebook’s own camera app would have grown faster, Zuckerberg responded, “I guess so, yeah. A billion dollars is very expensive.” 

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company’s $450 million settlement offer was “delusional.” 

“Mark bought his way out of competing, so I’m not surprised that he thinks he can buy his way out of law enforcement, too,” said Khan, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden. “His proposed remedy, like his market strategy, is: ‘let my illegal monopoly keep monopolizing.’” 

Meta spokeswoman Dani Lever said the company is prepared to win at trial. “We haven’t been shy about explaining why it doesn’t make sense for the FTC to bring a case to trial that requires it to prove something every 17-year-old in America knows is absurd—that Instagram doesn’t compete with TikTok,” she said.

“We will not comment on an ongoing trial,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.

The FTC had initially sued what was then called Facebook in December 2020 in the final weeks of the first Trump administration, accusing the company of buying and freezing out small startups to choke competition. The lawsuit was thrown out by a judge in 2021, and the FTC—under Khan—presented a more detailed case later that year. The suit accuses Facebook of having mounted a deliberate strategy to “eliminate threats to its monopoly.”

Meta has pushed back on the FTC’s charges, saying it competes with several other services including YouTube and X, and noting that the FTC had cleared the WhatsApp and Instagram deals more than a decade ago.

As the trial approached, the two sides had inched closer together. Meta had opened with an offer to make changes to some of its policies. The FTC countered with $30 billion, people familiar with the talks said—a fine that would be an order of magnitude larger than its record. In 2019, the FTC had imposed a $5 billion fine on Meta, at the time its largest fine ever imposed on a company for violating consumer privacy.

A person familiar with Meta’s position in the latest negotiations said the company’s offers reflected how weak the company believes the FTC’s case to be.

In recent months, Zuckerberg and his top aides have repeatedly met with Trump, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and other administration officials. White House aides say Meta has been relentless in trying to get the case dropped, bringing in a group of officials beyond Zuckerberg that include Meta chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, head of U.S. public policy Kevin Martin and Brian Baker, Zuckerberg’s outside political adviser. Zuckerberg himself visited the White House three times this year.

Trump at various points appeared more open to striking a deal with Meta and Zuckerberg, directing staff to work on a deal and asking questions about how a settlement would work, according to people familiar with the matter. 

But Trump was also getting an earful from the other side. On April 8, the new FTC chair Ferguson held a meeting with the president in the Oval Office to discuss the matter. Also present at the meeting were Gail Slater, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division; Mike Davis, one of the key antitrust advisers to Trump; Wiles and Ferguson’s chief of staff. 

At the meeting, earlier reported by Semafor, the group made its case for Trump not to intervene on Meta’s behalf and to let the case go to trial. It got Trump’s blessing to go to trial during the meeting, said one of the people. 

For Zuckerberg, who has spent tens of millions in recent years aiming to rebuild his relationship with Trump, the failure to reach a deal pretrial suggests he isn’t getting much return on his investment. Some people around Trump have warned the president that Zuckerberg’s MAGA rebrand is disingenuous.

In the fall of 2021, Zuckerberg and his wife hired Baker, a Republican strategist, to explain to Trump aides and Republican officials that the $400 million the pair had given for election infrastructure in 2020 hadn’t been used for partisan purposes. Conservatives had alleged the spending was used to bolster turnout on the left, a claim that Zuckerberg and election officials denied. After the assassination attempt on Trump, Zuckerberg publicly praised the candidate’s response as “badass,” and the two spoke by phone.

He traveled to Mar-a-Lago twice after the election, including for a dinner with Trump, and attended the inauguration in January, directing Meta to give $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. That month, Meta also paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit that Trump had brought years earlier over the platform’s suspension of his account. Zuckerberg also made changes to the company that conservatives have long sought, including dialing back its content-moderation policies.

The MAGA wing of the GOP has continued to criticize Meta and Zuckerberg and has blamed the company for Trump’s 2020 election loss. 

In an interview on Fox Business the morning the trial kicked off, Ferguson nodded to that line of attack. Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp had given the company “a tremendous amount of power, power we all saw on full display in 2020,” he said. “And so that’s what this case is about, is about addressing the power of Meta and making sure that the situation we had in 2020 can never arise again.”