He owns Instagram and its success is Meta’s and Zuckerberg’s success. But the CEO doesn’t always seem to act that way.

Mark Zuckerberg floated the possibility of spinning off Instagram from his social media empire amid rising regulatory scrutiny of the technology sector and an increasing concern that the photo sharing app was “cannibalizing” the success of Facebook.

About a year before the Federal Trade Commission first opened its antitrust investigation into Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, CEO Mark Zuckerberg internally suggested “the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company.”