When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg 'predicted' breakup of the company in 2018

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, in an email in 2018, informed senior leaders that the company was currently on a successful five-year path. However, he also acknowledged the possibility of a regulatory-driven breakup of the tech sector, while maintaining an optimistic view even if this were to occur, as per the emails presented by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) during the recent antitrust trial hearing in a Washington federal court.
“While we believe our current trajectory will yield strong business growth over the next 5 years, I worry it will also undermine our global network, erode our corporate brand, impose an increasingly large strategy tax on all of our work, and then over time we may face antitrust regulation requiring us to spin out other apps anyway,” Zuckerberg wrote in a 2018 email to top Facebook executives, as per Business Insider.
He said that while companies avoid breakups, it has turned in their favour.
“While most companies resist breakups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they've been split up," Zuckerberg wrote in May 2018 – 7 years prior to the trial.
“The synergies are usually less than people think and the strategy tax is usually greater than people think,” he added.

The FTC's intensifying legal battle to dismantle Meta Platforms has brought these insights to light. The agency alleges that Meta's acquisitions of Instagram (2012) and WhatsApp (2014) created an unlawful monopoly in social media.
Meta strongly refutes the FTC's accusations, asserting its presence in a fiercely competitive market with significant players like ByteDance's TikTok, Google's YouTube and Apple's iMessage.
Meta spokesperson Dani Lever dismissed the FTC's case, stating the company has been clear about the illogical nature of the FTC's claim that Instagram doesn't compete with TikTok – a fact, she argues, is obvious to most American teenagers.
“We are prepared to win at trial,” Lever asserted.
The FTC initiated its investigation into Meta in 2019, leading to the antitrust lawsuit in 2020. This legal action followed an earlier FTC privacy probe into Meta that began in 2018 in response to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.