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The Meta Trial Shows the Dangers of Selling Out
Several founders of hot startups took big payouts and let Mark Zuckerberg gobble up their companies—and came to regret it.
Legalities aside, the way these companies were upended by a Zuckerberg offer made the first few days of this case a dramatic and instructive study of acquisition dynamics between small and big business. Though almost all of these narratives have been covered at length over the years—I documented them pretty thoroughly in my own 2020 account Facebook: The Inside Story —it was striking to see the principals testifying under oath about what happened. “I can understand if you’re an entrepreneur who built one of those things and had awesome success, you’d wake up and say, ‘Okay, I’m proud of what I did, but this isn’t for me going forward.’ That’s how I see it, and we’re going in the right direction.” Those close to Kevin Systrom, though, believe that had Zuckerberg not asserted control, he would have remained at Instagram for 20 more years.
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