Inside Mark Zuckerbergs $24M DC suck-up campaign and whether it will be enough to save Meta

For Silicon Valley big shots, Mark Zuckerberg testifying at Meta’s ongoing trial before the Federal Trade Commission has hijacked their attention for the last week.Zuckerberg — whose company owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — spoke at trial to deny charges that his business has illegally monopolized social media.The commission is aiming to break up Meta and have its three main products managed independently of each other, following through on a suit filed in December 2020 during Donald Trump’s first term as president.After the suit languished under President Joe Biden, the new Trump administration has picked it back up and brought it front and center.“There are people in the Trump orbit who want to extract pain from Zuckerberg,” a White House insider acknowledged to The Post, although they added: “But I don’t know that the case is going to go where they want it to go.”Tech titans are gripped because the trial represents a bellwether of their own possible fates and a potential reckoning on Big Tech.“This is a UFC-like battle between the FTC and Meta,” Dan Ives, global head of tech research at Wedbush Securities, told The Post about mixed martial arts-loving Zuckerberg’s showdown with an entity of the federal government.“This has been years in the making.

Pressure in the Beltway has continued to increase against Big Tech.It’s Meta today.

But tomorrow it could be Amazon, Apple and others.So this is a case that everyone in tech and on Wall Street is observing.”For Google, the tides already appear to be changing.

A federal judge made a landmark ruling on April 17 deciding for the first time that the company has a monopoly in two advertising markets, which is likely to cause them disruption moving forward.But if one of the tech bros has to be in the hot seat to defend the industry, Zuckerberg may now be the right man for the job.“He’s not going to take this sitting down,” Ives added.“You’re talking about his baby, which ...