Facebook became a publicly traded company in 2012.
Its initial public offering took place on May 18, 2012, when Facebook shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol FB. The company priced its IPO at $38 per share and offered hundreds of millions of shares to public investors.
The flotation valued Facebook at roughly $104 billion, making it one of the largest technology IPOs at the time. The first day attracted enormous attention, but trading was disrupted by technical problems at Nasdaq, and the stock closed only slightly above its offering price. Facebook’s market debut therefore became both a major corporate milestone and a notable exchange-operations controversy.
Facebook had been incorporated in Delaware in 2004 and had grown from a college-centered website into a global social platform before going public. In 2021, its parent company changed its name from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc. The stock later changed tickers from FB to META, but the original public listing year remained 2012.