Meta used to be Facebook. Why state the obvious? The answer is that what’s obvious very much calls into question the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta, the corporation formerly known as Facebook.
Ok, but why the name change? Kodak is still Kodak, U.S. Steel is still U.S. Steel, and in a sense RCA is still RCA. It’s all true, and for being true helps explain why Facebook is now Meta.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now CEO of Meta precisely because he’s working feverishly to help it avoid the fate of past corporate giants. Specifically, a failure to evolve has proven the path to mediocrity on the best day, bankruptcy on the worst.
Zuckerberg plainly knows business history well. Knowing it, he’s doing everything he can to not take his creation down a well-worn path of ubiquity born of greatness to yet another cautionary tale about what happens to great businesses that rest on their laurels.
For refusing to do as formerly great businesses have done routinely, Zuckerberg finds himself in court, defending what he’s created from antitrust charges. Supposedly Meta is a monopoly, and the FTC’s evidence is Facebook’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram, followed by its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.
FTC lawyers constrained by an extreme form of hindsight look back on the purchases and find “evidence” of monopoly. It’s apparent these lawyers have never answered to shareholders, boards, fickle equity markets, or all three. Would it be that any CEO, including a founder, could blithely consummate billion and multi-billion-dollar acquisitions. Except that they can’t.
Readers can rest assured of what’s true, that a lack of sleep for Zuckerberg preceded both, and followed both. That’s because predicting tomorrow in business is like picking not this year’s Super Bowl winner, but the winner five years into the future.
It’s a reminder of the striking naivete that informs the actions of the FTC. Somehow they’ve deduced that Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’s acquisitions were easy, and easy because they were obvious. More realistically they were excruciating precisely because they were much more likely to fail as spectacularly as an NFL insider trying to predict not Super Bowl LX, but LXIV.
The only difference is that insiders can be wrong, repeatedly. Not so chief executives. They answer to the most powerful force in the world, the stock market. And if anyone doubts the previous characterization, they need only Google “Trump,” “tariffs,” “blinked.”
Back to Zuckerberg, he acquired Instagram and WhatsApp not because doing so would be easy, or because he could see clearly what others didn’t, but exactly because he had no choice but to do what was incredibly difficult while partially blindfolded. There’s your business history for you, and there’s your misguided FTC lawsuit for you.
While hindsight is always 20/20, so is history. Which means the only certainty Zuckerberg was in possession of was the obvious: Facebook wouldn’t be Facebook for long without taking big risks. In other words, Zuckerberg wasn’t buying the proverbial unicorns to protect Facebook from the future, he was buying them to help Facebook find the future.
Except that Facebook isn’t even Facebook anymore. Which is the point. Facebook sitting idle was a sitting duck for ravenous competitors, so would Facebook combined with Instagram and WhatsApp have been.
Which means we have Meta. It’s a prominent signal that contra the FTC and its backward-looking attorneys, Meta is many things, none of them a monopoly. This statement of the obvious can be found in a simple name change that symbolizes how fearful a prominent corporation is of a commercial tomorrow that as history makes clear, will look nothing like today.
