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Technology|What if Mark Zuckerberg Had Not Bought Instagram and WhatsApp?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-instagram-whatsapp.html
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Meta’s antitrust trial, in which the government contends the company killed competition by buying young rivals, hinges on unknowable alternate versions of Silicon Valley history.
By Mike Isaac
Mike Isaac has covered Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp since 2010, when they were still three separate companies.
April 14, 2025, 10:34 a.m. ET
In 2012, when Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg cut a $1 billion check to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram, most people thought he had lost his marbles.
“A billion dollars of money?” joked Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show. “For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures?”
Mr. Stewart called the decision “really lame.” His audience — and much of the rest of the world — agreed that Mr. Zuckerberg had overpaid for an app that highlighted a bunch of photo filters.
Two years later, Mr. Zuckerberg opened his wallet again when Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion. Many Americans had never heard of the messaging app, which was popular internationally but was not well known in the United States.
No one knew how these deals would turn out. But hindsight, it seems, is 20/20.
On Monday, the government argued in a landmark antitrust trial that both acquisitions — now considered among the greatest in Silicon Valley history — were the actions of a monopolist guarding his turf. Mr. Zuckerberg, in turn, was set to contend that were it not for these deals, his company — which has been renamed Meta — would just be an afterthought in the social media landscape.
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