Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg had offered FTC $450M in failed bid to settle antitrust case: report
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta reportedly extended a paltry offer of just $450 million to settle the landmark FTC antitrust case that could result in the company’s breakup.
Zuckerberg made the offer – which was just a fraction of the $30 billion that the FTC had demanded – during a call in late March with the agency’s chairman Andrew Ferguson, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
During the call, the Meta boss “sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC,” the Journal’s sources said.
Ferguson balked at the lowball offer and said he would not accept anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree barring Meta from anticompetitive practices.
In response, Zuckerberg increased the offer to nearly $1 billion.
But the billionaire was unable to strike a deal with the FTC and the trial kicked off on Monday as scheduled – with Zuckerberg as the first witness.
Zuckerberg faced a grilling from FTC attorneys for the third straight day on Wednesday as the agency seeks to force Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp as separate business.
The FTC indicated in a previous court filing that he would testify longer than any other witness.
The FTC is alleging that Meta has maintained a monopoly over social media firms built on friends-and-family connections – with Snapchat as its only real competitor and other platforms like video-based TikTok and Google-owned YouTube in a separate market.
The feds claim Zuckerberg utilized a “buy or bury” strategy to acquire upstarts like Instagram and WhatsApp before they could threaten the company’s business.
Meta has pushed back, arguing it directly competes with TikTok for user attention.
Meta declined to comment on the reported settlement talks. Company 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,” Lever said in a statement.
Representatives for the FTC and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment.
Zuckerberg has taken drastic measures to cozy up to Trump in recent months – including joining other tech leaders in attending his inauguration and personally visiting the White House at least three times since January.
During those meetings, he has reportedly pressed Trump to settle the FTC case.
A $30 billion settlement would be, by far, the largest of its kind in the FTC’s history. In 2019, the agency slapped Meta with a record $5 billion fine for violating user data privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Zuckerberg’s much smaller settlement offers showed how weak Meta believes the FTC’s case to be, a source close to the negotiations told The Post.
Meanwhile, Big Tech skeptics in Trump’s orbit have pushed the president to stay tough on Meta.
That includes Ferguson, who met with the president in the Oval Office on April 8 alongside the Justice Department’s new antitrust chief Gail Slater and a longtime Trump ally and antitrust adviser, lawyer Mike Davis. Semafor was first to report on the meeting.
During Zuckerberg’s appearance in court on Tuesday, FTC attorneys showed a 2018 document in which he fretted about buying Instagram and whether Facebook would need to be restructured to avoid a federal crackdown during President Trump’s first term.
“I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company,” Zuckerberg said, according to the document.
“As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps Whatsapp in the next 5-10 years anyway,” he added.
Zuckerberg also faced tough questions about other smoking-gun emails – including a 2012 exchange in which Zuckerberg acknowledged to ex-CFO David Ebersman that buying Instagram would effectively “neutralize a competitor.”
Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for about $19 billion in 2014.
