Leaked Zuckerberg audio: Promises to 'go to the mat' if government tries to break up Facebook
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees that "you go the mat and you fight" if a politician like Sen. Elizabeth Warren tries to break up tech companies, according to leaked audio from July.
Zuckerberg candidly discussed a wide range of topics in two hours of audio from open meetings with employees in July, obtained by The Verge.
"You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies ... 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. And does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to have a major lawsuit against our own government," Zuckerberg said.
"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 you fight," he added.
Warren, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, was quick to respond to the leaked audio.
"What would really 'suck' is if we don't fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy," she wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
Warren unveiled a proposal in March to break up the country's biggest technology companies – which she referred to as "monopolies."