Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, has lobbied President Trump and his aides to resolve a federal antitrust lawsuit against his company that is set to go to trial on April 14, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
Mr. Zuckerberg has made several trips to the White House and Mar-a-Lago to discuss the matter, along with other issues, said two of the people, who were not authorized to reveal private conversations. Most recently, he visited the White House on Wednesday morning.
The Federal Trade Commission sued Meta in 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first term, accusing the company of stifling competition by buying young start-ups such as Instagram and WhatsApp and preventing them from becoming fully fledged businesses. Meta could resolve the lawsuit with a settlement. It is unclear whether Mr. Zuckerberg’s efforts have led the Trump administration to consider settling.
Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, which also owns Facebook, said the company “regularly meets with policymakers to discuss issues impacting competitiveness, national security and economic growth.”
The White House did not immediately have a comment, and the F.T.C. declined to comment. Details of the meetings were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.
In its lawsuit, the F.T.C. claimed that Meta had violated antitrust law by acquiring young rivals and depriving consumers of alternative social media platforms. The F.T.C. argued that Meta’s 2012 purchase of the photo-sharing site Instagram for $1 billion and its 2014 deal for the messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion should not have been approved.
The company sought to “buy or bury innovators threatening to outcompete Facebook in the new mobile environment,” the F.T.C. said in its complaint.
Meta has denied acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to kill competition, and has said it invested heavily in developing innovations for the apps. Meta has also said it continues to face stiff competition from rivals like TikTok, YouTube, Snap and iMessage.
The acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp proved to be prescient. Instagram has become a core part of Meta’s business, bringing in billions in annual revenue. WhatsApp has quadrupled in size to two billion users, and has started generating significant revenue for Meta.
A federal judge quashed the antitrust case in 2021, but it was soon revived after the F.T.C. added more evidence and analysis to support its claims.
Now a trial is set to start in less than two weeks. The trial is likely to feature testimony from high-profile Meta executives including Mr. Zuckerberg; Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer; and Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram.
Meta executives have been intensely preparing for the trial for months, working closely with outside counsel in the event they are called to testify, two people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s White House visits are part of an effort to improve Meta’s relationship with the government and specifically Mr. Trump, whom he clashed with in the past. In December, Meta announced that it had donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural fund. And Mr. Zuckerberg promoted Joel Kaplan, a Republican and longtime Meta executive, to become the company’s head of global public policy and to deepen relationships with the Trump administration.
