Meta trial exposes how billionaires battle for scale

#306: How a beer by the river forged the fearsome twosome that took Meta to $1.35 trillion - and how fear was the trigger...

Welcome to the stage Sheryl Sandberg. Miss Lean In Herself. The beancounter to Zuck’s big vision. The profit in the product, and Silicon Valley’s It Girl. What a show.

In her second day giving testimony, she said TikTok really began to cause fear at Facebook around 2020, and she warned the board that it could grab $6 billion in ads.

“It was a big deal,” she told the antitrust court. “Wall Street doesn’t particularly like misses of any size, but especially in the billions.”

Sandberg joined what was then Facebook in 2008 from an ad role at Google. Some serious Valley bigwigs were pulling the string as it was time to turn Zuck into bucks.

PayPal mafia and early Facebook board member Peter Thiel had been in Zuck’s ear about a COO. Sheryl was in the mix.

A meeting between the two was arranged at a holiday party organised by the former COO of Yahoo.

Google’s then CEO and Sandberg’s boss gave it his blessing. “Great move for Facebook,” he said.

The Guardian reported on the hire:

Facebook is looking to develop significant new revenue streams from its 100 million-plus global unique user base.

Sandberg was responsible for building and managing Google’s online sales channels including flagship revenue-generation products AdWords and AdSense.

There’s some irony that Sandberg was giving evidence in Meta’s antitrust suit, on the exact day the ad products she built at Google were ruled an illegal monopoly.

These Valleywags have their hands in everything...

Anyway she was hired, and Meta went to the moon. Cash poured in. Zuck built the audience and bought his rivals, while Sandberg turned it into a $1.35 trillion mega cap.

Now it’s facing a break-up with the US Federal Trade Commission arguing its $20 billion acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were part of a “build-or-bury” strategy to create an illegal monopoly and kneecap competition.

In court yesterday, Sandberg told some of that. “It was a scary time,” she said, before revealing how the billionaires won the day, yet again…