Facebook pushed back Thursday after Chris Hughes, a billionaire co-founder of the company, argued in a New York Times Op-Ed essay that the company should be broken up and regulated.

“Facebook accepts that with success comes accountability,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communication, wrote in a statement. “But you don’t enforce accountability by calling for the breakup of a successful American company.”

The statement followed a lengthy Op-Ed by Mr. Hughes published online Thursday morning arguing that the social media giant be subjected to extensive government oversight and separated into multiple companies, notably by spinning off the photo-sharing app Instagram and the messenger service WhatsApp. The essay will appear in print on Sunday.

Mr. Hughes was a co-founder of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg 15 years ago when they were undergraduates at Harvard. He left the company in 2007 to work with the Obama campaign and more recently has focused on the issue of income inequality. In the essay, he said repeatedly that Mr. Zuckerberg is a good, kind person but simply has too much power for any one individual.