Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg hoped to avoid a high-stakes antitrust trial playing out this week in Washington, D.C., but he wasn’t willing to pay the price US antitrust cops wanted.

He and the Federal Trade Commission encountered stratospheric differences on what it would take to settle a case seeking the breakup of Zuckerberg’s empire, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

In March, Zuckerberg offered the head of the FTC $450 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, well short of the $30 billion demanded by the FTC. He eventually increased it to $1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, but FTC boss Andrew Ferguson wouldn’t accept anything lower than $18 billion.

The revelations about Zuckerberg’s attempts to settle with the Trump administration add a new layer of drama to the legal battle between the social media giant and the FTC, which alleges Meta became a monopoly in the market for “personal social networking” by buying up potential rival social media startups such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meta’s Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion. The FTC reviewed and approved the purchases but now wants a judge to force Meta to divest both of them.

Zuckerberg and his top aides made multiple visits to the White House to meet with President Trump and administration officials before the trial began. Zuckerberg also made two visits to the president’s private Mar-a-Lago club. And Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Trump, according to the Wall Street Journal, did ask staff to work on a potential settlement. But Ferguson and the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, persuaded Trump to support their recommendation to proceed to trial.

This week in court, the FTC wasted no time laying out evidence against Zuckerberg by calling the CEO as its first trial witness.

Instagram became the FTC’s central topic as prosecutors confronted Zuckerberg with his past emails.

In a 2012 email, Zuckerberg told Facebook’s then-CFO, David Ebersman, that purchasing Instagram and other startups could be viewed as a way for Facebook to buy time.

“Even if some new competitor springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare etc. now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again,” Zuckerberg wrote, according to an account of the testimony reported by Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg agreed under questioning by the FTC’s attorney that buying Instagram was intended to “neutralize a competitor,” but he added that the purchase was also meant to boost Facebook’s quality and functionality.