Meta 1.9.5.2503
Christopher Caldera
You can watch the full Connect keynote and learn more about how the metaverse will unlock new opportunities at meta.com. You can also learn more about our work over the past several months to develop the Meta brand on our design blog. Read all our news in the posts below:
Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities, and grow businesses. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward immersive experiences like augmented and virtual reality to help build the next evolution in social technology.
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Meta Platforms, Inc.,[10] doing business as Meta,[11] and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc.,[12][13] is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services.[14] Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023.[15]
Meta has also acquired Oculus (which it has integrated into Reality Labs), Mapillary, CTRL-Labs, and a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms; the company additionally endeavored into non-VR hardware, such as the discontinued Meta Portal smart displays line and presently partners with Luxottica through the Ray-Ban Stories series of smartglasses.[16][17] Despite endeavors into hardware, the company relies on advertising for a vast majority of its revenue, amounting to 97.8 percent in 2023.[18]
Parent company Facebook, Inc. rebranded as Meta Platforms, Inc. on October 28, 2021, to "reflect its focus on building the metaverse",[19] an integrated environment linking the company's products and services.[20][21][22]
Facebook filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on January 1, 2012.[23] The preliminary prospectus stated that the company sought to raise $5 billion, had 845 million monthly active users, and a website accruing 2.7 billion likes and comments daily.[24] After the IPO, Zuckerberg would retain 22% of the total shares and 57% of the total voting power in Facebook.[25]
Trading in the stock, which began on May 18, was delayed that day due to technical problems with the Nasdaq exchange.[31] The stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, forcing underwriters to buy back shares to support the price.[32] At the closing bell, shares were valued at $38.23,[33] only $0.23 above the IPO price and down $3.82 from the opening bell value. The opening was widely described by the financial press as a disappointment.[34] The stock nonetheless set a new record for trading volume of an IPO.[35] On May 25, 2012, the stock ended its first full week of trading at $31.91, a 16.5% decline.[36]
On May 22, 2012, regulators from Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced that they had begun to investigate whether banks underwriting Facebook had improperly shared information only with select clients rather than the general public. Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin subpoenaed Morgan Stanley over the same issue.[37] The allegations sparked "fury" among some investors and led to the immediate filing of several lawsuits, one of them a class action suit claiming more than $2.5 billion in losses due to the IPO.[38] Bloomberg estimated that retail investors may have lost approximately $630 million on Facebook stock since its debut.[39] S&P Global Ratings added Facebook to its S&P 500 index on December 21, 2013.[40]
On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure".[41][42] The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."[43]
Lasso was a short-video sharing app from Facebook similar to TikTok that was launched on iOS and Android in 2018 and was aimed at teenagers. On July 2, 2020, Facebook announced that Lasso would be shutting down on July 10.[44][45][46]
In 2018, the Oculus lead Jason Rubin sent his 50-page vision document titled "The Metaverse" to Facebook's leadership. In the document, Rubin acknowledged that Facebook's virtual reality business had not caught on as expected, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on content for early adopters. He also urged the company to execute fast and invest heavily in the vision, to shut out HTC, Apple, Google and other competitors in the VR space. Regarding other players' participation in the metaverse vision, he called for the company to build the "metaverse" to prevent their competitors from "being in the VR business in a meaningful way at all".[47]
In May 2019, Facebook founded Libra Networks, reportedly to develop their own stablecoin cryptocurrency.[48] Later, it was reported that Libra was being supported by financial companies such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber. The consortium of companies was expected to pool in $10 million each to fund the launch of the cryptocurrency coin named Libra.[49] Depending on when it would receive approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory authority to operate as a payments service, the Libra Association had planned to launch a limited format cryptocurrency in 2021.[50] Libra was renamed Diem, before being shut down and sold in January 2022 after backlash from Swiss government regulators and the public.[51][52]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online services including Facebook grew globally.[53] Zuckerberg predicted this would be a "permanent acceleration" that would continue after the pandemic.[53] Facebook hired aggressively, growing from 48,268 employees in March 2020 to more than 87,000 by September 2022.[53]
"Meta" had been registered as a trademark in the United States in 2018 (after an initial filing in 2015) for marketing, advertising, and computer services, by a Canadian company that provided big data analysis of scientific literature.[59] This company was acquired in 2017 by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a foundation established by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and became one of their projects.[60] Following the rebranding announcement, CZI announced that it had already decided to deprioritize the earlier Meta project, thus it would be transferring its rights to the name to Meta Platforms, and the previous project would end in 2022.[61]
Soon after the rebranding, in early February 2022, Meta reported a greater-than-expected decline in profits in the fourth quarter of 2021.[62] It reported no growth in monthly users,[63] and indicated it expected revenue growth to stall.[62] It also expected measures taken by Apple Inc. to protect user privacy to cost it some $10 billion in advertisement revenue, an amount equal to roughly 8% of its revenue for 2021.[64] In meeting with Meta staff the day after earnings were reported, Zuckerberg blamed competition for user attention, particularly from video-based apps such as TikTok.[65]
The 27% reduction in the company's share price which occurred in reaction to the news eliminated some $230 billion of value from Meta's market capitalization.[66] Bloomberg described the decline as "an epic rout that, in its sheer scale, is unlike anything Wall Street or Silicon Valley has ever seen".[66] Zuckerberg's net worth fell by as much as $31 billion.[67] Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta, and the holding makes up the bulk of his wealth.[68][69]
According to published reports by Bloomberg on March 30, 2022, Meta turned over data such as phone numbers, physical addresses, and IP addresses to hackers posing as law enforcement officials using forged documents. The law enforcement requests sometimes included forged signatures of real or fictional officials. When asked about the allegations, a Meta representative said, "We review every data request for legal sufficiency and use advanced systems and processes to validate law enforcement requests and detect abuse."[70] In June 2022, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of 14 years, announced she would step down that year. Zuckerberg said that Javier Olivan would replace Sandberg, though in a "more traditional" role.[71]
In March 2022, Meta (except Meta-owned WhatsApp) and Instagram were banned in Russia and added to Russian list of terrorist and extremist organizations for alleged Russophobia and hate speech (up to genocidal calls) amid ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.[72] Meta appealed against the ban but it was upheld by a Moscow court in June of the same year.[72]
Also in March 2022, Meta and Italian eyewear giant Luxottica released Ray-Ban Stories, a series of smartglasses which could play music and take pictures. Meta and Luxottica parent company EssilorLuxottica declined to disclose sales on the line of products as of September 2022, though Meta has expressed satisfaction with its customer feedback.[17][73][74]
In July 2022, Meta saw its first year-on-year revenue decline when its total revenue slipped by 1% to $28.8bn.[75] Analysts and journalists accredited the loss to its advertising business, which has been limited by Apple's app tracking transparency feature and the number of people who have opted not to be tracked by Meta apps. Zuckerberg also accredited the decline to increasing competition from TikTok.[76][77][78] On October 27, 2022, Meta's market value dropped to $268 billion, a loss of around $700 billion compared to 2021, and its shares fell by 24%. It lost its spot among the top 20 US companies by market cap, despite reaching the top 5 in the previous year.[79]
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