How to Trade Meta (Facebook) (META)

Mark Zuckerberg (age 19), Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes launched TheFacebook on February 4, 2004 from Kirkland House at Harvard. It initially connected Harvard students before expanding to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale within a month. Peter Thiel invested $500,000 for a 10.2% stake later that year.

Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012, a deal widely seen as expensive at the time. It went public in May 2012 at $38 per share, raising $16 billion—the largest tech IPO in history then. Zuckerberg’s holdings were worth $19 billion on day one.

Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion, the largest social media acquisition at the time. WhatsApp had 450 million users but minimal revenue. The deal gave Facebook dominance in global messaging.

Zuckerberg announced the rebrand to Meta Platforms in October 2021 to pivot toward the metaverse. The Reality Labs division has accumulated over $70–80 billion in losses over five years. Projects like the Supernatural VR game were shut down in 2026, but Meta continues investing in AI glasses and AI-driven features.

After the metaverse hype faded, Zuckerberg declared 2023 the 'Year of Efficiency,' cutting over 20,000 jobs and refocusing on core business. Meta’s LLaMA models became leading open-source AI systems. The stock surged over 150% in 2023, with market cap reaching ~$1.49 trillion.