Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, but tensions between Mark Zuckerberg and the app’s founders persisted for years afterward. On Tuesday, former Instagram CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom took the stand in an antitrust court in Washington, D.C., and gave a firsthand account of how Zuckerberg viewed the photo-sharing app as a “threat” to Facebook.
Systrom, who ran Instagram until 2018, said that Zuckerberg slowed down hiring and other investments in Instagram despite its success. Zuckerberg, according to Systrom, “thought we were a threat to their growth” and as a result “didn’t invest” in the photo-sharing app, according to the testimony published by The New York Times. According to The Times, even after reaching 1 billion users, Instagram employed only a small fraction of the staff that Facebook did. “As the founder of Facebook, he had a lot of emotions about whether Instagram or Facebook was better,” Systrom said.
Tensions between Instagram’s founders and Zuckerberg over the company’s resources have been reported before, but Systrom’s testimony is the first time he has publicly detailed the issues that ultimately led to his resignation from the company. Speaking on Tuesday, Systrom said that Zuckerberg “believed we were hurting Facebook’s growth,” Bloomberg reports.
Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is at the center of the FTC’s case against Meta. The government argues that Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram was anticompetitive and that the social network should be forced to sell the businesses. Systrom’s testimony comes a week after Zuckerberg took the stand in court and defended the $1 billion purchase of Instagram. However, a 2018 email from Zuckerberg that surfaced at the beginning of the trial showed that the Facebook founder knew as early as 2018 that he could be forced to spin off these services into independent companies.
