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They were trying to get both, there was no contingency of getting one and not getting the other. Snapchat just refused to be sold for the same price.
by Larrikin 2y ago
They were trying to get both, there was no contingency of getting one and not getting the other. Snapchat just refused to be sold for the same price.
- dmix 2y agoRight I looked it up. They bought Instagram in 2012 and tried to buy Snapchat a year later. Since it didn't happen it's pretty moot to the discussion. M&As with massive market consolidation like that get challenged all the time in courts so it's hard to say what would have happened then. FTC investigated the Instagram purchase in 2012 and chose not to interfere. So failed acquisition doesn't make buying Instagram inherently an anticompetitive move, just maybe can be spun as their strategy at the time, but a decade later the market still has plenty of players so it will be a tough case to make. Although even a failed case gives the government leverage over Meta with threats of future ones so they might not care.
- jb1991 2y agoSince the discussion is entirely about their motivation in buying Instagram, it’s certainly not moot at all. They wanted to have a monopoly and remove the competition. That was the motivation. The FTC investigation specifically had a condition that they would reevaluate the acquisition in coming years. This was widely expected to be done, and everyone knew about it at the time of the acquisition.