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Meta – A Company That Has Got Half The Population Scrolling Down Their Mobile Phones.

Meta is most commonly known as Facebook Inc as it hasn’t been a year since the company was rebranded. It is one of the world’s largest technology companies apart from Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. By the end of 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of the name to Meta as it also reflects the focus of the company to building the metaverse. Facebook Inc (now Meta) was founded in 2004, and it is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and many other subsidiaries. So, the company is mostly dominating the entire social media industry in most parts of the globe apart from countries where it is blocked.

About Meta

The brains behind founding Meta are Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Meta’s headquarters are located in Menlo Park, California, US and there are more than 70,000 employees working for the company from various parts of the world. Apart from billions of active users of social media, Meta earns a good portion of its revenue from advertisement postings. One of the early and largest acquisitions by Meta was in 2012 when it bought Instagram. Meta has also acquired companies like Giphy, Mapillary, Oculus, and owns a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms.

Meta
Image source: vox-cdn.com

History of Facebook

Facebook was launched during a time when the internet eventually became famous and it was coming closer to common people in terms of availability. A social media platform for chatting, posting pictures, etc sounded very new and thus exciting, especially for the younger population. In 2012, when Mark Zuckerberg decided to file an IPO, the Facebook platform was already receiving billions of likes and comments. After Facebook becomes public, Zuckerberg was to retain 22% ownership of the company and 57% of the voting shares. So, when Facebook became a public company it was valued at $104 billion. The IPO raised for Facebook was one of the largest in the history of the US economy.

But, a massive company like Facebook that had to increase the number of shares offered due to high public demand, caught everyone’s attention. So, the regulators from Wall Street decided to investigate if there has been any leaking of information to selected clients rather than the general public. There were several accusations leading to the filing of several lawsuits some retail investors losing millions over this fury. Facebook became a part of the S&P 500 index in 2013. In 2014, the company decided to change its motto to “Move fast with stable infrastructure” from “Move fast and break things.”

Acquisitions

Facebook has acquired several companies which the company calls “talent acquisitions”. After acquiring Instagram which was one of the first acquisitions of the company, it acquired Onavo, an Israeli company in 2013. In 2014, Facebook showed its interest in buying Whatsapp for $19 billion and later that year also acquired Oculus VR for $2.3 billion. Facebook wanted to create its own stable coin cryptocurrency hence it founded Libra Networks in 2019. Meta has also mentioned that Libra is backed up by companies like Visa, PayPal, Uber, and Mastercard. In 2019, Meta acquired the game developer Beat Games and then next year announced about the 10 percent (approximate) stake acquisition of Jio Platforms, digital media of Reliance Industries. In 2020, Meta also announced the acquisition of Giphy for $400 million.

About Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most famous tech entrepreneurs across the globe. He started writing software from an early age (when he was in middle school) and his dad also taught him basic programming. Zuckerberg went to Harvard and he was already famous as a programming prodigy. He started writing the code for a website early in 2004 and after one month he launched the website, “Thefacebook.” Eventually, he dropped out of college to carry on with his project. In 2017, he received an honorary degree from Harvard. Zuckerberg is currently the CEO of Meta Platforms.

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