Zuckerberg Really Thought Trump Would Make Meta’s Legal Problems Go Away

Meta is currently defending itself in an antitrust trial brought by the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the tech giant violated competition laws when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp. But the more we learn about the case, it seems clear that CEO Mark Zuckerberg thought President Donald Trump would save him from this indignity.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg offered to settle the antitrust case by handing over $450 million. The FTC reportedly wanted $30 billion, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson wouldn’t settle for anything less than $18 billion along with a consent decree, according to the Journal.

Zuckerberg apparently “sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC,” according to the new report which quotes anonymous people who are “familiar with the matter. Zuck’s confidence was apparently a reference to the fact that the Meta CEO’s company had donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and settled a lawsuit with the president for $25 million in a move that was largely seen as a gift to Trump.

Zuckerberg, who testified for more than seven hours Tuesday in the Facebook co-founder’s second day of testimony, reportedly upped his offer from $450 million to $1 billion before the trial started, according to the Journal. But it wasn’t enough.

The Meta CEO was asked Tuesday about his acquisition of Instagram back in 2012, and whether it was a move to “neutralize” a competitor. Meta, formerly known as Facebook before Zuck tried to rebrand the entire company around the metaverse, bought the photo-sharing app at a time when he was consolidating power in the social media space. FTC lawyers presented evidence Tuesday that included a memo from Zuck in 2018 admitting that it was possible they’d have to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp in the future over antitrust concerns.

“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,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time.

Zuck defended the memo Tuesday, according to court testimony published by the New York Times, saying, “I just wanted to be mindful that we should have a strategy that is creating the most value for the people we’re trying to serve, taking into account the direction that the politics seemed to be telling you at that time.”

Zuck is back on the witness stand Wednesday, with the trial expected to last eight weeks. And while it would be both highly unusual and unethical for a president to intervene in a case like this, there’s no telling what could happen if President Trump decides to help Meta for one reason or another. Zuck has traveled to Mar-a-Lago at least twice since the 2024 presidential election and has clearly pivoted his political sympathies in a very public way to get closer to the MAGA universe.

And it’s easy to understand why Big Tech billionaires think they can get Trump to play ball. Trump has unlawfully interfered with the FTC since retaking power on Jan. 20, 2025, firing two Democratic FTC commissioners last month. The FTC commission is made up of five people, with no more than three members of a given party at one time. Alvaro Bedoya, one of the fired commissioners, spoke to Gizmodo last month about how Big Tech is spending huge sums to benefit Trump.

“We are the agency that enforces the law against the likes of Amazon, Meta, OpenAI and of course X,” Bedoya told Gizmodo at the time. “I think it’s really important that people pay attention to the fact, for example, that Amazon cut a deal with the First Lady to feature her in a documentary on her life that would result in $28 million of payments to her. And that Amazon also recently licensed The Apprentice for tens of millions of dollars.”

Gizmodo reached out to Meta on Tuesday but didn’t get a response. The company was defiant in a statement to the Wall Street Journal, saying, “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.”