From “The Facebook” to Meta: a 20-year history

If Meta was a person, it’d be almost able to buy itself a beer. Sunday marked exactly two decades since 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched a digitized Harvard student directory called “The Facebook” – a site that now claims ~40% of the world’s population as monthly active users (3.1 billion people).

Here are some of Facebook’s major happenings over the past 20 years:

• 2004: “The Facebook” hit the 1 million user mark ten months after launching as an exclusive service for college students.
• 2005-06: Facebook dropped “The” from its name because of Sean Parker, opened up access to anyone over the age of 13, and launched its “News Feed.”
• 2012-14: The tech giant made a trio of major purchases – Instagram for $1 billion, WhatsApp for $19 billion, and Oculus VR for $2 billion – held a record-setting IPO, and reached the 1 billion user mark.
• 2016-18: Facebook cut ties with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica after learning it improperly obtained millions of users’ data. Zuckerberg also testified before Congress over Facebook’s handling of user privacy.
• 2021-24: Facebook changed its corporate branding to Meta, reached a $1 trillion market cap for the first time, and saw the largest single-day valuation increase in history (+$197 billion) after announcing a brand-new stock dividend.

👀 Looking ahead… Meta says it’s currently focused on two long-term bets for the future: AI and the metaverse.