Meta owns three of the world's most-used social platforms and has invested heavily in AI and augmented reality hardware
Meta Platforms, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and has expanded into artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and cloud services.
Meta $META Platforms, Inc. is an American technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, California, primarily known for owning and operating Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — three of the most widely used social media and messaging platforms in the world. The company is listed on the Nasdaq $NDAQ stock exchange under the ticker META.
Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in 2004 while a student at Harvard University, alongside Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Facebook, Inc. went public in 2012 in what was one of the largest technology IPOs at the time. The company acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, consolidating its position across photo sharing and mobile messaging.
In 2021, Facebook, Inc. rebranded to Meta Platforms, Inc., a name intended to reflect an expanded focus beyond social networking toward what Zuckerberg described as the "metaverse" — a concept for persistent, interconnected virtual and augmented reality environments. But Meta's ambitions for the metaverse lost tens of billions of dollars, and the company effectively abandoned them in 2026.
Meta's core business model is digital advertising. The company sells targeted advertisements across its family of apps, using data collected from user activity to allow advertisers to reach specific audiences. This advertising business generates the substantial majority of Meta's revenue.
Beyond social platforms, Meta has made sustained investments in artificial intelligence and consumer hardware. Its Reality Labs division develops augmented and virtual reality products, including the Quest line of virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses, produced in partnership with EssilorLuxottica. The company has also developed large language models under the LLaMA family, which it has released publicly for research and commercial use, positioning Meta as a significant participant in the generative AI space. Meta has also moved into cloud services, offering AI computing capacity to outside customers.
Meta employs tens of thousands of people worldwide and operates data centers across North America, Europe, and Asia. The company faces ongoing regulatory and legal scrutiny in multiple jurisdictions over data privacy, market competition, and platform safety.
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