Mark Zuckerberg encouraged growth over child safety, ex-Meta executive testifies at trial

This is very consequential right now.

Four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — are seeking up to $1.4 trillion in penalties and product changes under consumer protection laws that they allege were broken by Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. They say Meta also violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by hoovering up data about children.

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/17/nx-s1-5930701/meta-trial-kids-social-media-addiction

In the recent suit in New Mexico they received almost a billion dollars in penalties. That represents less than 1% of their annual revenue, but a billion dollars is still a significant amount of money.

More importantly, the New Mexico verdict is expected to set a precedent which will affect the outcomes of the other lawsuits. The engineer's statement in the Reuters article is just the beginning of testimony for the suit in California. We're just getting started.

If they end up losing a year's revenue out of this, that could actually end the company. $1.4T is their entire net worth. The states bringing these lawsuits are threatening to completely wipe the company out.

Ironically Mark Zuckerberg is well known for doing unprofitable things, and for building his company in a way where he cannot be removed.