We can always just buy any competitive startups
Mark Zuckerberg — sworn congressional testimony, US House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Hearing
“At the time of the acquisition, we viewed Instagram as a complementary mobile photo sharing app, not a direct competitor to Facebook.”
Mark Zuckerberg to David Ebersman (CFO) — internal acquisition strategy email, Internal email exchange
“These businesses are nascent, but the networks are established... One business driver is that if someone grows very fast, we can likely always just buy them to neutralize the competitive threat. By buying them, we prevent them from becoming disruptive.”
The Split:In congressional antitrust hearings, Zuckerberg maintained that Instagram was merely a complementary photo app. In his contemporaneous emails to Facebook’s CFO, he stated the exact predatory strategy: buying nascent networks to neutralize them before they can disrupt Facebook.
The word complementary in antitrust testimony usually means: we bought them before their curve crossed ours.