Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook)

Before Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg built FaceMash in October 2003 — a site that scraped Harvard student photos from dormitory websites and asked visitors to rate which student was more attractive. It went viral overnight, crashed Harvard's servers, and earned Zuckerberg a disciplinary hearing before the Harvard Administrative Board. He was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights, and violating privacy. Charges were dropped. Zuckerberg described it as a social experiment.

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.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, along with Divya Narendra, sued Zuckerberg claiming he had stolen their idea — ConnectU — which they had hired him to build. The lawsuit was settled in 2008 for approximately $65 million in cash and Facebook stock. The twins later tried to reopen the case, claiming they had been defrauded in the settlement. They lost. They used the Facebook proceeds to buy Bitcoin early, eventually becoming billionaires anyway.

Facebook went public in May 2012 at a $104 billion valuation — the largest tech IPO in history at the time. 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 first. Shareholders were furious. The acquisition became the defining strategic decision of Facebook's history.

In October 2021, Zuckerberg announced Facebook was renaming itself Meta and betting the company on the metaverse — virtual and augmented reality environments where people would work, socialise, and play. Meta invested over $13 billion in Reality Labs in 2022 alone. 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."