Meta (Facebook)

Mark Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook on February 4, 2004 from his Harvard dorm room. Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up. Within a month, half the undergraduate population had profiles. The site expanded to Yale, Columbia, and Stanford within weeks. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year. His co-founder Eduardo Saverin provided $19,000 of initial funding. The Winklevoss twins would later claim Zuckerberg had stolen the idea from them, settling for approximately $65 million in 2008.

Facebook went public in May 2012 at a $104 billion valuation. The stock immediately fell below the IPO price and stayed there for over a year. Simultaneously, Zuckerberg acquired Instagram for $1 billion — a deal he negotiated personally over a single weekend, without telling his board. Shareholders were furious. Instagram was worth an estimated $100 billion by 2018. The acquisition became the defining strategic decision in Meta's history — and the subject of a decade of antitrust scrutiny.

In October 2021, Zuckerberg announced Facebook was renaming itself Meta and betting the company on the metaverse. Meta invested over $46 billion in Reality Labs between 2021 and 2024. The metaverse never materialised at the scale Zuckerberg envisioned. The stock fell 65% in 2022. Employees nicknamed the rebrand "the pivot to avoid talking about Frances Haugen," the whistleblower who had released internal documents showing Facebook knew its platforms caused harm.

In 2023, Zuckerberg declared the "year of efficiency," laying off over 21,000 employees — approximately 25% of Meta's workforce — across two rounds of cuts. He stripped management layers, cancelled projects, and refocused the company on its core advertising business. The stock tripled in twelve months. Meta's AI-powered ad tools, which used machine learning to optimise targeting and creative, began delivering measurably better returns for advertisers than any competitor.

Meta closed 2025 with $200.97 billion in revenue and 3.58 billion daily active people across its apps — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Meta AI, its conversational AI assistant, reached 1 billion monthly active users by October 2025. Llama, its open-source AI model, crossed 1 billion cumulative downloads. The company committed $115-135 billion in capital expenditure for 2026 — more than Microsoft and OpenAI combined — to build the AI infrastructure it believed would define the next decade. Zuckerberg, who had staked his reputation on the metaverse and nearly destroyed it, had pivoted to AI and rebuilt Meta into one of the most valuable companies on earth.