Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Capitol Hill on January 20, 2025, after Donald Trump's presidential inauguration. (Photo by Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post)
Buying Instagram was one of the smartest moves Mark Zuckerberg ever made. So why does he seem so envious of his own app?
On trial this week to defend Meta from a potential government break up, and for years before then, Zuckerberg has sometimes treated Instagram more like a rival than a successful part of his own company.
Meta’s alleged undermining of Instagram is a key argument in the U.S. government’s case accusing the company of breaking antitrust law, in part by buying Instagram to "neutralize” it as an upstart competitor.
The company says that buying Instagram and the WhatsApp chat app was good for competition and consumers, and that Meta has helped both apps succeed.
I’ve been puzzled for years by Zuckerberg’s apparent jealousy of his own app. But after consulting with two psychologists and a culture writer, Zuckerberg’s attitude seems relatable. It might be similar to the envy that you can feel toward a successful person close to you. Or it’s a platonic version of a romantic partner’s fear that you’re eclipsing him.
The ‘big sister’ to Instagram
Trial documents show that in 2018, Zuckerberg considered casting off Instagram, partly because he worried that its growth could hurt the Facebook app and also raise red flags with regulators. He mused at the time whether promotions of Instagram posts in the Facebook app artificially boosted Instagram’s popularity.
It’s plausible that Zuckerberg’s concern about Instagram gaining at Facebook’s expense was not entirely rational financially. If Instagram grew more popular, even if Facebook took a dip, that could still be an overall benefit to Meta. (Or, because Facebook was more profitable than Instagram at least at the time, favoring that app might have been logical.)
And in 2020, the journalist and author Sarah Frier reported that Zuckerberg questioned whether to announce when Instagram reached a milestone of 1 billion users. Instagram was reaching popularity levels that made it look like the next Facebook app, she wrote, and the company didn’t want its original app to suffer in comparison.
An unnamed Instagram executive told Frier that Meta "was like the big sister that wants to dress you up for the party but does not want you to be prettier than she is.”
Zuckerberg competes fiercely against TikTok and the Snapchat app, but, unlike Instagram, they’re not part of his company.
During trial questioning this week in Meta’s antitrust case, Zuckerberg said that it was "extremely unlikely” that Instagram would have been so successful on its own, the Verge reported.
He also said that he gave Instagram resources to help it beat back spam and win more users. Zuckerberg said in court that he "mostly wanted to make sure that Instagram could grow in whatever way was going to be best.”
How Zuckerberg might be like us
Abraham Tesser, a distinguished research professor emeritus at the University of Georgia’s psychology department, can see Zuckerberg fitting a three-ingredient theory of envy.
You are more likely to feel envy toward people who are close to you; when you perceive that they’re successful; and when it’s in an area that matters to you, like athletic prowess, romantic relationships or professional accomplishments.
If one of those ingredients is missing, you might not feel envious, he said.
Tesser described experiments with pairs of friends tested with quiz games. One person in the pair was made to believe that they were doing poorly in the quiz game compared with their friend and strangers.
When the less-successful person cared about their performance and then was asked to help their friend in the game, the less-successful person sabotaged their own friend. People didn’t do that in quiz pairings with strangers.
Tesser declined to offer a detailed analysis of Zuckerberg, but he said that from his research, the "big sister” quote resonated.
Tesser said Zuckerberg may be treating the Facebook app, which he started from his college dorm room, as an extension of himself - while the acquired Instagram is like a successful close friend he envies and might undermine. (Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger created Instagram.)
"What appears to be the case is that Zuckerberg is identifying more with Facebook, which makes sense; he founded it,” said W. Gerrod Parrott, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University. "He sees anything that hurts Facebook as hurting himself” - even if that’s another app that Meta also owns, he said.
Magdalene J Taylor, a cultural writer about sex and romance, said Zuckerberg’s apparent attitude toward Instagram - that it wouldn’t be as successful without him, yet worried about its success - could be compared to a jealous lover.
She cited the 1980s pop song "Don’t You Want Me?”, in which a male narrator puts down his former partner by emphasizing that she was a waitress when they met and that he "turned you into someone new.”
"Don’t forget it’s me who put you where you are now/And I can put you back down, too.”
The woman’s version of events, in the next verse, is different.
A Meta spokesman didn’t make Zuckerberg available for comment and did not address the assessments of his feelings toward Instagram.
