"I wonder if we should consider buying Instagram"
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Elon Musk emails Jensen Huang
From: Elon Musk
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 12:01 AM
To: Jensen Huang
Subject: DGX-1
Can OpenAI buy one of the early units? The team was asking me about this earlier today.
OpenAI is unaffiliated with Tesla. It is a non-profit funded by me and a few others with the goal of developing safe AGI (and hopefully not paving the road to hell with good intentions).
On Apr 19, 2016, at 10:11 AM, Jensen Huang wrote:
Iāve not forgotten.
This is the first supercomputer thatās selling itself off the web! Demand coming from all over.
First shipment starts end next month. And already taking orders for delivery in September.
I will make sure OpenAI gets one of the first ones.
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]
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Mark Zuckerberg messages Facebook execs
February 11, 2012
Mark Zuckerberg
I wonder if we should consider buying Instagram, even if it costs ~$500m.
Right now they seem to have two things that we donāt: a really good camera and a photo-centric sharing network. For the camera piece, their camera just takes photos that look much nicer than the native camera because of their filters, tilt-shift effects and even their new lux feature. I just took a photo this morning from the native camera and uploaded it to FB and it looked so low quality compared to the Instagram shots I see. Theoretically we could go build this technology, but Iām worried weāre so far behind that we donāt even understand how far behind we are and that this is going to be a huge amount of work. (For example, Schrep was telling me yesterday that some people on the photos team think the new Instagram camera isnāt good, but it introduced this awesome new lux feature that essentially double their number of filters and seems to improve the quality of every photo I try to take with it.) Given this, I worry that it will take us too long to catch up, if we even will. And regardless, their brand is established as the awesome mainstream camera, so even if we catch up on features theyāre still the awesome iPhone camera app.
For the network piece, one concerning trend is that a huge number of people are using Instagram every day -- including everyone ranging from non-technical high school friends to even FB employees -- and theyāre only uploading some of their photos to FB. This creates a huge hole for us and one that Iām sure anything weāre going to do on platform or with social dynamics will completely solve. Sometimes you donāt want to bug all your FB friends with a lot of photos so you put them in the photo-posting place instead.
With Snap, our basic thesis is that what people need is a good way to post a bunch of photos on FB. Weāre doing some work on filters but not a ton, and the team is approaching this more as a nice feature and somewhat of a gimmick. Instagram, on the other hand, is approaching this problem from the perspective of how to help people take beautiful photos. I think itās quite possible that our initial thesis was wrong and that theirs is right -- that what people want is more to take the best photos than to put them on FB. If so, Snap might be a good first step but weād be very behind in both functionality and brand on how one of the core use cases of Facebook will evolve in the mobile world, which is really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.
What do you guys think?
Mike Schroepfer
Instagram is ~7 people and theyāve leveraged some outside help (we found the person whos done most of the art direction on their filters) so we can catch up technically if we put some good people behind it. However, the network is even more concerning to me.
Mike Schroepfer
Iād deeply consider it - I was already planning on spending some more time 1:1 with Kevin to talk about places API - I can accelerate that.
Mike Schroepfer
My big question would be from a product perspective how would we merge the networks (or not)
Mark Zuckerberg
On merging, I think what weād do is keep their product running and just not add more features to it, and focus future development on our products, including building all of their camera features into ours. By not killing their products we prevent everyone from hating us and we make sure we donāt immediately create a hole in the market for someone else to fill, but all future development would go towards our core products. Over time we might build Instagram features that encourage people to link to FB and push more of their activity through OG, but Iām not sure weād have to prioritize that super highly as part of an acquisition plan.
Mark Zuckerberg
For what itās worth, I think the game plan would be the same if we bought Path, although that would be mainly in the identity group with some people going to photos rather than having the whole team go to photos.
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Twitter link
Threads link
Previously: Instagram cofounder on Mark Zuckerberg: āwill he go into destroy mode if I say noā (February 13, 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg tries to buy Instagram (Circa March 2012)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: Should we buy Instagram, Foursquare, or Pinterest?(April 5, 2012)
Previously: 25+ more documents from Mark Zuckerberg in the full archive
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