Why Zuck spent $20 billion on Instagram and WhatsApp

Meta's attempt to nix its upcoming antitrust trial has failed. Now its $20 billion acquisitions and behaviour will come under the spotlight...

“How times have changed. Not so long ago, a company called Facebook so dominated social networking that a movie charting its rise was called simply The Social Network.

“Fifteen years later, the company now called Meta argues that the market with which it was once nearly synonymous does not even exist.”

I couldn’t have written it better myself, but these are the opening lines of a US judge’s ruling on the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) effort to break-up Meta.

Written in the judge’s own hand, the ruling is packed with zingers from the opening to the closing on page 92, and on a long flight I had time to read it all. It’s a beauty.

It’s unmissable if you use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, or if you rely on Meta for traffic, or revenue, or used to. This tells you what you need to know.