Instagram Co-Founder Says Mark Zuckerberg Saw App’s Growth as ‘Threat’

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his fledgling photo-sharing app could have succeeded without being acquired by Meta Platforms Inc., and that eventually Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg treated Instagram's growth as a “threat” and starved it of resources.

The claims could bolster the US government's monopoly case against the social networking giant as lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission push to unwind the 2012 acquisition of the photo app, which today is used by almost three billion people worldwide and is projected to contribute roughly half of Meta's US ad sales this year.

Systrom, testifying Tuesday at Meta's antitrust trial in Washington, recounted how quickly Instagram was growing before Zuckerberg's purchase offer. “The users, they just kept coming,” Systrom recalled under questioning by FTC lawyer Bob Zuver. The government displayed a chart of Instagram's growth before the acquisition that showed registered users increased 13-fold in 2011, the year before the deal. 

Systrom said he believed Instagram was capable of launching several important features, including support for videos and private messages, even if the company hadn't been acquired by Meta, then called Facebook. He said that Instagram didn't need infrastructure help — it used Amazon Web Services to keep the site operational — and the startup could have successfully combated spam and other harmful content as a standalone company. 

“We would have been able to scale our problematic content screening fairly well,” he said. “It wasn't rocket science.” During cross-examination from Meta's lawyers later in the day, Systrom acknowledged that Instagram's success was no sure thing. “It could have gone either way,” he said. “The probability of us failing was low, but it could have failed.”

Systrom, who remained with Instagram after the acquisition, said Zuckerberg was hot and cold on the photo app during the time that he worked there, and grew to view Instagram as a threat to Facebook. Systrom said Instagram rarely got the resources that he requested, including headcount for companywide initiatives like video and integrity efforts around data privacy. Following the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, Systrom says Instagram got no new employees despite a broad effort to shore up Meta's data practices. 

“I thought that that was not appropriate given the scale of Instagram,” he said. 

FTC lawyers also showed emails from Systrom where he was frustrated about Meta's investment in Instagram. In one to former Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, Systrom wrote that “we also have areas that are ‘starving'” for investment. In another email to Instagram leaders in 2017, Systrom complained that Instagram got no additional workers despite a wide investment to increase the company's video ambitions. 

“We were given zero of 300 incremental video heads, which is an unacceptable and offensive outcome,” Systrom wrote.

At the trial, Systrom acknowledged that all teams fight for resources and headcount, but that given Instagram's role in driving revenue and growth for the company he felt offended by the lack of support.

“I was working very hard for the company to make this a success and not getting resources back,” he said. “It was in stark contrast to the effort I was putting in.”

Later, Systrom said the resources Meta provided were still key to the app's success and incredible growth. “Yes, they gave us many resources that allowed us to thrive,” he said. 

Lawyers for the FTC are seeking to prove that by purchasing Instagram in 2012, and WhatsApp in 2014, Meta created an illegal social networking monopoly, and the agency wants US District Judge James Boasberg to undo the deals. After agreeing to sell his company for $1 billion, Systrom continued to run it within Facebook until 2018.

The government has sought to establish that Instagram was an up-and-coming rival to Meta that would have been a formidable competitor had it stayed independent. During the trial's first week, the FTC displayed dozens of internal emails from Zuckerberg and other top executives fretting over Instagram's rapid growth and superior photo products. It is also aiming to show that Meta's purchase of the popular app led to harm for users by increasing ads and decreasing safety and security. 

Meta, meanwhile, has argued that Instagram became a massive success thanks in large part to the support it provided the photo app following the acquisition. Lawyers for the company spent several hours Tuesday afternoon highlighting the myriad ways Meta helped Instagram grow, including hiring and paying for employees, enhancing the photo app's advertising system and helping promote it via Facebook. Instagram, which had about 30 million registered users when it was acquired, now has more than 2.8 billion monthly users, a Meta lawyer said. 

“When we acquired Instagram, it had about two percent of the users it has today, just 13 employees, no revenue, and virtually no infrastructure of its own,” Meta General Counsel Jennifer Newstead wrote in a blog post earlier this month before the trial started. “Many of the features that are now central to the Instagram community — direct messaging, live video streaming, shopping and stories — were built on Meta's core technology infrastructure after the acquisition.”

Roelof Botha, an early Instagram investor from Sequoia Capital, suggested during a video deposition that was played Monday in court that Instagram benefited from Meta's data centers and other technical infrastructure. He pointed out that several other photo-sharing apps from that time — including a few that Sequoia also invested in — ultimately failed. 

On the stand Tuesday, Systrom also acknowledged that Facebook helped the app grow before the acquisition because many Instagram users also posted their photos to their Facebook account. At the time, Instagram users were also encouraged to share their photos to other social networks, including Twitter — an option that was shut off shortly after the acquisition.

Facebook also drove significant user traffic to Instagram following the acquisition by adding tabs in the Facebook app that directed people to Instagram and sending users push notifications. An internal Meta report estimated that these efforts led to nearly 38 million more monthly users per year in 2018. Meta also spent more than $130 million (roughly Rs. 1,109 crore) in advertising on Instagram, both on and off Facebook, around that time, documents show. 

Systrom said that Zuckerberg eventually shut off much of that support for Instagram inside the Facebook app — including the notifications and some links that sent people back to the photo-sharing app — starting in 2018.

“He believed we were hurting Facebook's growth,” Systrom said, adding that Zuckerberg believed that slowing Instagram's growth would simultaneously slow Facebook's decline. Emails showed that Systrom believed that these changes would cut Instagram's growth by as much as 100 million new monthly users per year. 

When asked whether Zuckerberg was ultimately happy to have Instagram as part of the company, Systrom said it was “a complex question.”

“He was always very happy to have Instagram in the family because it was growing so quickly and we did great product work,” Systrom said. “But also I think as the founder of Facebook he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better, meaning Instagram or Facebook.”

© 2025 Bloomberg LP

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)