Inside Mark Zuckerberg's failed negotiations to end antitrust case

The FTC wanted $30 billion to drop its case. Zuckerberg offered much less and hoped Trump would back him up.

- Dana Mattioli, Rebecca Ballhaus & Josh Dawsey

Mark Zuckerberg called the head of the Federal Trade Commission in late March with an offer: Meta would pay $450 million to settle a long-running antitrust case that was about to go to trial.

The offer was far from the $30 billion that the FTC had demanded. It was also a fraction of the value of Instagram and WhatsApp, the two apps Meta had bought and were at the heart of the government's case.

On the call, Zuckerberg sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC, said people familiar with the matter. The billionaire Facebook co-founder had been developing closer ties to Trump—his company donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration and settled a $25 million lawsuit—and had been pressing the president in recent weeks to intervene in the monopoly lawsuit.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible, and wasn't ready to settle for anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree. As the trial approached, Meta upped its offer to close to $1 billion, the people said, and Zuckerberg led a frenzied lobbying effort to avoid the FTC trial.

It wasn't enough. On Monday, the trial kicked off. The FTC called Zuckerberg—who privately expressed reluctance about taking the stand—to testify for four hours.

Zuckerberg was back on the witness stand Tuesday, where he faced questioning from an FTC lawyer over whether Facebook had paid $1 billion to buy Instagram to "neutralize" a competitor. Asked if he would have preferred that Facebook's own camera app would have grown faster, Zuckerberg responded, "I guess so, yeah. A billion dollars is very expensive."

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company's $450 million settlement offer was "delusional."