About a year before the Federal Trade Commission first opened its antitrust investigation into Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, CEO Mark Zuckerberg internally suggested “the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company.”

Mark Zuckerberg was the leadoff witness in an antitrust case against Meta – one filed under the first term of the president he's now cozying up to.

Mark Zuckerberg floated the possibility of spinning off Instagram from his social media empire amid rising regulatory scrutiny of the technology sector and an increasing concern that the photo sharing app was “cannibalizing” the success of Facebook.