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.”

In a 2018 email to his executives, Zuckerberg wrote that, ​​”while most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they’ve been split up.”  The memo was displayed in court on Tuesday as he testified in the FTC’s anti-monopoly case, where Meta is fighting a government lawsuit that could lead to it being broken up.

Meta spent billions acquiring Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. But by 2018, Zuckerberg sensed that shifting politics could lead to, as he wrote in the memo, “a non-trivial chance we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years.” He warned his exec team that, “We should keep in mind that there’s a real chance that all our work to build a family of apps may be something we don’t get to keep.”

“It’s not too hard to imagine the calls increasing to break up the tech companies, and the next democratic presid …

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