Facebook says it will ‘go to the mat’ to fight breakup attempt
Zuckerberg says it would ‘suck,’ but the company will sue the U.S. government if necessary
It sounds like Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg might be taking some business lessons from the classic film “The Godfather,” at least with regards to the possibility of Elizabeth Warren becoming president.
Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts who is running for president, has called upon the United States government to break up Facebook, as well as Google and Amazon, due to what she sees as those companies’ overwhelming dominance of social media, the internet, and technology, in general. Earlier this year, Warren laid out plan for breaking up the tech giants should she be elected president in 2020.
However, Zuckerberg doesn’t intend on taking Warren’s potential company break-up efforts laying down, and he may have plans to go to the mattresses like the Corleone family did when it battled other organized crime families in director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 cinematic
classic.
“But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and fight,” Zuckerberg said in the recordings that were obtained by The Verge.
In the recordings that he had with Facebook employees this summer, Zuckerberg sounded like he didn’t look forward to getting into a scrap with a Warren-led administration, but felt like he would have no choice but to sue the government should it seek to break up Facebook.
“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren (who) thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies,” Zuckerberg. “I mean, if she gets elected president then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge.”
The Verge later published what it said was a full transcript of the Zuckerberg Q&A recordings. In response, Zuckerberg took to his Facebook page to not only not refute the recordings, but to also include a link to the transcript and invite anyone to read it.
“Even though it was meant to be internal rather than public, now that it’s out there, you can check it out if you’re interested in seeing an unfiltered version of what I’m thinking and telling employees on a bunch of topics like social responsibility, breaking up tech companies, Libra, neural computing interfaces, and doing the right thing over the long term,” Zuckerberg
said.
During one of the meetings, Zuckerberg made it clear that, as a matter of principle, he would lead the battle against being forced to break up his company. But, Zuckerberg admitted he didn’t relish the possibility of such legal action against the federal government because it would “suck for us.”
“I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. I mean, that’s not the position that you want to be in when you’re, you know, I mean … it’s like, we care about our country and want to work with our government and do good things.”