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Mark Zuckerberg’s failed Snapchat bid resurfaced in Meta’s antitrust trial.
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And the Meta boss seems like he hasn’t fully moved on.
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“I think if we would had bought them we would have accelerated their growth,” Zuckerberg testified.
It’s been over a decade since Snapchat turned down a multibillion-dollar acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg — and the tech titan still doesn’t seem over it.
The failed bid was highlighted on Tuesday while Zuckerberg was on the witness stand for a second day of testimony in Meta’s blockbuster antitrust trial.
Zuckerberg’s Meta, then called Facebook, offered to buy the photo-messaging app Snapchat for $6 billion in 2013 just two years after its launch, according to an email from Zuckerberg revealed at the trial.
It was widely reported at the time that Snapchat rejected a $3 billion takeover attempt from Facebook.
“I delivered the offer to Evan and he seemed to take it well,” Zuckerberg wrote in an October 2013 email to other company executives, referring to Snapchat cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel. “He told me he thought he could get it done and that he’d call me back quickly.”
Zuckerberg continued in the email, “At this point, we should probably prepare for it to leak that we offered $6b for them and all the negative that will come from that.”
While under questioning by a Federal Trade Commission attorney on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he thought Snapchat “wasn’t growing at the potential that it could” and believed he could make it better.
“For what it’s worth, I think if we would had bought them we would have accelerated their growth, but that’s just speculation,” Zuckerberg testified in a Washington, DC, federal courtroom.
The US government introduced the email to try to bolster its argument that Zuckerberg’s Meta sought to maintain its dominance in the social media market through acquisitions rather than competition.
During his testimony, Zuckerberg said Snapchat “was and is a meaningful competitor.”
When asked about Zuckerberg’s comments on how he says he could have improved the app, Snap spokesperson Monique Bellamy told Business Insider: “Anticompetitive behavior can often slow and thwart growth for smaller companies and startups, especially when dominant companies like Meta use their size and position to stifle competition.”
“Public reports of Meta’s attempt to buy Snap, and then egregiously copy its features, was an attempt to do just that,” Bellamy said.
