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.”

Meta’s antitrust trial, in which the government contends the company killed competition by buying young rivals, hinges on unknowable alternate versions of Silicon Valley history.

: The FTC presented a document in the Meta antitrust trial showing that CEO Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea of spinning off Instagram in 2018. In a memo to top Meta executives in May of that year, Zuckerberg wrote that he was worried “we are approaching our family strategy incorrectly - especially around Instagram.