Near the end of the testimony of Mark Zuckerberg in the Washington Court of Washington, a smile smiled on his face.
Mita’s main lawyer, Mark Hansen, asked the CEO about whether he was “happy” about paying $ 19 billion for WhatsApp in 2014.
Zuckerberg thickens a smile and takes a short pause, and responded, “I will do it again.”
Over the past decade, the increasing range of Instagram and WhatsApp has supplied Meta as one of the most powerful companies on the ground. Now, the United States government, through a lawsuit against the Federal Trade Committee, is trying to relax these acquisitions through a trial that started on April 14. Zuckerberg spent about 13 hours over three days answering questions from FTC and Meta lawyer. Most of that time was devoted to Wednesday to try to refute one basic argument: he bought both applications to take them out and not make them better.
FTC claims that WhatsApp was obtained because Zuckerberg and its CEO were concerned at the time that private correspondence applications would grow to become entirely social media companies. From the platform of witnesses, Zuckerberg acknowledged that he was “something I thought about”, but he thought it would be “very unlikely” to compete with WhatsApp with Facebook after he met his founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton.
He said that “it is difficult to express the contempt” that both men had on social media and advertising, and after the acquisition, it was he who slowly pushed them to add more social features, such as stories, to WhatsApp. The court was presented with an e -mail describing an early meeting between Zuckerberg and Kom, where Zuckerberg told his colleagues that he found that com was “not ambitious”, and after a short period of Facebook acquisition, WhatsApp was not trying to expand into different things.
From Zuckerberg’s point of view, the early height of WhatsApp is a shift in how people communicate online, when conversations began to move away from public surfaces, such as Facebook news feeding, and in private chat threads. He was ready to pay a record for WhatsApp because he saw it as one of the “valuable” assets to help Facebook to move in this transformation. WhatsApp also saw a “crane” for his tense relationship with Apple and Google.
“We are always worried about tampering with us,” Zuckerberg said of both companies on the position of witnesses. He explained how we “rely on them for distribution” through their application stores, and that he believes that buying WhatsApp will give more negotiating power if he needs to return to a specific store policies. (“I am not sure of the actually helped this,” Right Confessed.)
An internal surface has been prepared for the Facebook Board of Directors soon from the WhatsApp. WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
Earlier in the day, Zuckerberg said it was “not worried” about Instagram’s competition with Facebook until he reached one billion users after years, after he bought it. For fear that Instagram will remove the participation from Facebook, then he directed Instagram to rely less on the integration of features with Facebook Traffic.
Instagram founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, did not interact with “positively” with this guidance, according to Zuckerberg. Both left the company shortly after a period, although Zuckerberg mentioned several times that Systrom led Instagram for longer years than originally expected.
During the examination of both FTC and Meta Legal, Zuckerberg described the resources that Instagram gave early to help the application fight unwanted messages and expand their operations. The court has witnessed internal documents showing that Instagram barely has 10 million users when obtaining it. Zuckerberg predicted that it is “very unlikely” that the app is successful on its own. Select he and Systrom the goal of reaching 100 million users when purchasing Instagram. She now has more than two billion users.
In general, the last day of Zuckerberg was on The Witness Stand Painted Instagram and WhatsApp as investments exceeded his own expectations, not victims of the fishing and murder strategy accused by FTC of carrying out to discourage monopoly.
Near the end of the day, the former Meta Coo Sherly Sandberg was called for his testimony. I was asked about an e -mail that I wrote to Zuckerberg soon from the $ 1 billion acquisition of Instagram, which she said is paying “a lot”.
“I think I was wrong,” she said on Wednesday. “Like, very wrong.”
