Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg conceded a crucial concession in a U.S. Antitrust Trial on Tuesday. He said he purchased Instagram because its camera was “better than” the one that his company had been trying to develop for Facebook’s flagship app at the time.

The acknowledgment seemed to support allegations made by U.S. Antitrust enforcers that Meta used a strategy of “buy or bury” to grab up potential competitors, keep smaller rivals at bay, and maintain an illegal monopoly.

The incident occurred during Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony at the high-stakes Washington trial, where the U.S. Federal Trade Commission seeks to undo Meta’s acquisitions involving Instagram and WhatsApp.

The case was filed during the first term of President Donald Trump and is seen by many as a test for the Trump administration’s promise to go after Big Tech.

When asked by an attorney from the FTC if he thought that fast-growing Instagram might be harmful to Meta, formerly known as Facebook at the time, Zuckerberg replied that he felt Instagram had a superior camera product than what Facebook was developing.

Zuckerberg explained that they were comparing the pros and cons of buying vs. building an app for a camera. “I thought Instagram was better than other apps at this, so I decided to buy them.”

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that many of the company’s attempts at building its apps had failed.

‘BUILDING A NEW APP IS HARD’

“Building a brand new app is difficult, and we’ve tried many times to create a brand new app, but it never got traction,” Zuckerberg said in court.

He said that the majority of apps he had built over the years of his company’s existence didn’t work.

Meta defends itself after releasing damning statements from Facebook documents. One of these was a 2008 email where Zuckerberg said, “It is better to compete than buy.”

The company claims that the FTC’s definition of the social media market is inaccurate and fails to take into account the stiff competition Meta faces from ByteDance, TikTok, and Alphabet’s YouTube, as well as Apple’s messaging application.

The FTC accuses Meta of holding a monopoly over platforms used to share content with friends and families. In the United States, its main competitors are Snap’s Snapchat and MeWe, a tiny privacy-focused social media app launched in 2016.

Platforms where users broadcast content to strangers based on shared interests, such as X, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit, are not interchangeable, the FTC argues.