Last Updated on April 22, 2025 by Michael Motha
Fb acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, however tensions between Mark Zuckerberg and the app’s founders continued for years afterward. On Tuesday, Instagram’s former CEO and cofounder Kevin Systrom took the stand in Meta’s antitrust trial in Washington D.C and supplied a firsthand account of how Zuckerberg seen the photo-sharing app as a “risk” to Fb.
Systrom, who ran Instagram till 2018, mentioned that Zuckerberg slowed hiring and different investments into Instagram regardless of its success. Zuckerberg, Systrom testified, “believed we had been a risk to their progress,” and consequently “was not investing” within the photo-sharing app, based on testimony The New York Instances. As The Instances notes, Instagram had solely a fraction of the staff as Fb even after reaching 1 billion customers. “Because the founding father of Fb, he felt quite a lot of emotion round which one was higher, that means Instagram or Fb,” Systrom reportedly mentioned.
Tensions between Instagram’s founders and Zuckerberg over firm assets have been , however Systrom’s testimony is the primary time he’s publicly spoken concerning the points that in the end led him to resign from the corporate. On the stand Tuesday, Systrom mentioned that Zuckerberg “believed we had been hurting Fb’s progress,” Bloomberg.
Fb’s acquisition of Instagram is central to the FTC’s . The federal government has argued that Meta’s buy of WhatsApp and Instagram had been anticompetitive and that the social media firm needs to be compelled to divest the companies. Systrom’s testimony comes per week after Zuckerberg took the stand and defended Meta’s $1 billion Instagram acquisition. Nevertheless, a 2018 electronic mail from Zuckerberg that within the trial confirmed that the Fb founder was conscious as early as 2018 that he might be compelled to spin off the companies into impartial entities.
