Yesterday’s antitrust hearing/circus with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google had a bit of everything.
Here’s one takeaway for each butt in the hot seat, plus a couple more.
The receipts looked baaaad. The questioners whipped out 2012 emails showing Mark Zuckerberg was very worried about Instagram, a competitor at the time.
One memorable line from his outbox: “Instagram can hurt us meaningfully without becoming a huge business.” The Verge called the emails “clear statements” that Zuck “moved to buy the upstart app to insulate Facebook from current and future competition.”
It got hot inside Google’s garden. CEO Sundar Pichai took heat for an investigation by The Markup that showed many searches starting on Google… end up right back on Google (it found 41% of the first page of Google mobile results is taken up by Google products).
Those words won’t reassure anybody. Last week, The Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell saying Amazon invested in startups — and used the intel to launch its own private-label goods.
When asked Wednesday, Bezos said Amazon has rules against doing that. Then he added: “I can’t guarantee you that policy has never been violated.”
Tim Cook took the fewest questions. The New York Times’s tally showed he faced 35, vs. ~60 for the others. When it was his turn in the spotlight, he was fightin’ off questions about the App Store.
While all eyes were glued to the livestream…
- TikTok tried to steal the show. CEO Kevin Mayer said the company will open its algorithm to outsiders’ eyes — and challenged Zuck & Co. to follow suit.
- Snapchat tried the ‘ol news dump. Its first-ever diversity report is out. The results weren’t pretty.
- Twitter got dragged into it. One Congressman seemed to ask Zuck about something that happened on Twitter. Oops.
Your take
We asked y’all which Big Tech company would reach a $2T market cap fastest. ~3k readers responded:
- 57.8%: Amazon (current market cap: ~$1.51T)
- 12.3%: Apple (~$1.6T)
- 10.8%: Tesla (~$278B)
- 7.4%: Alphabet/Google (~$1T)
- 4.3%: Facebook (~$665B)
- 6.5%: Someone else
