No one is saying what the settlement looks like. Defence lawyers stayed schtum, and Delaware Court of Chancery judge Kathaleen McCormick simply adjourned the case with a polite pat on the back for both sides.

Shareholders’ lawyer Sam Closic told the court the agreement came together in a flash, just as billionaire venture capitalist and Meta director Marc Andreessen was about to take the stand.

The lawsuit targeted Zuckerberg, Andreessen and a rogue’s gallery of former company brass, including ex–chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Investors wanted them personally on the hook for billions in fines and legal costs Meta has racked up thanks to years of playing fast and loose with Facebook user data.

It all harks back to the Federal Trade Commission’s record $5 billion fine in 2019 after Facebook flouted a 2012 privacy agreement. Shareholders claimed that board members flatly ignored the deal and that Zuckerberg and Sandberg deliberately kept Facebook running as an industrial-scale data harvesting machine.

The 11 defendants called the allegations “extreme claims,” but investors weren’t buying it. They wanted their personal fortunes tapped to clean up the mess.

Meta wasn’t directly a defendant. It has kept its mouth shut about the settlement, and the defence team didn’t respond either.

Digital Content Next boss Jason Kint said: "This settlement may bring relief to the parties involved, but it’s a missed opportunity for public accountability.”

The trial promised an unusual glimpse of Zuckerberg under oath. He was pencilled in for Monday, Sandberg on Wednesday, and even former board members like Peter Thiel of Palantir Technologies and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings were due to speak.

Instead, it fizzled like so many Zuckerberg legal dramas. In 2017, he was also set to testify in a shareholder suit over his plan to issue a special class of stock to tighten his grip on Facebook, until that, too, quietly settled.

The privacy scandal stems from the notorious Cambridge Analytica fiasco, where millions of users’ data landed in the paws of a political firm working for Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign. That mess directly triggered the record FTC fine.

On Wednesday, the plaintiffs’ expert witness described “gaps and weaknesses” in Facebook’s privacy policies but stopped short of saying the company violated the 2012 deal. Former board member Jeffrey Zients insisted the FTC fine wasn’t designed to shield Zuckerberg personally from liability.

Meta claims on its website to have poured billions into user privacy since 2019, which feels like a late apology.

“Facebook has successfully remade the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal about a few bad actors rather than an unravelling of its entire business model of surveillance capitalism and the reciprocal, unbridled sharing of personal data,” Kint said, adding that the real reckoning remains unresolved.