Meta bought rivals because 'only the paranoid survive'

#303: Zuck slugs it out with the FTC revealing Meta's inner strategies to defend its position as social's $164 billion big dog...

Meta considered splurging $6 billion to buy Snap because its own apps usually flopped and only the paranoid survive in Big Tech, an antitrust court heard yesterday.

Mercurial billionaire Mark Zuckerberg told the Federal Trade Commission he was hit and miss on building winning products, and buying smaller winners was a strategy.

He tried to buy Snap in 2013 but CEO Evan Spiegel, husband of Aussie supermodel Miranda Kerr, turned him down, The Information reported.

Zuck told colleagues “he just wants to build the company on his own”.

The court also saw internal Meta emails from 2018 where he discussed spinning Instagram off over antitrust fears, and his worries about WhatsApp.

He even banned ads from global competitors including WeChat and Kakao which he considered emerging rivals.

“Those companies are trying to build social networks and replace us,” he wrote to execs. “The revenue is immaterial to us compared to any risk.”

Meta’s lawyer Mark Hansen told the court “only the paranoid survive,” quoting a popular ideology from the dog-eat-dog world that’s rife in Silicon Valley.

Before we launch to more blockbuster evidence, welcome to new subs overnnight from TikTok’s parent ByteDance, Google’s video star YouTube, Microsoft’s content acquisition team in London, Yahoo in Silicon Valley, Harvard Business School, Norwegian media conglomerate DN Media, creator video platform TapeReal and RevOptimal in San Diego, where there’s great surfing 🏄‍♂️ and smaller sharks 🦈, and more :)

Now back to the trial that’s redrawing the future of Big Tech…