Meta Platforms was called Facebook, Inc. before its 2021 rebranding.
Facebook, Inc. changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms, Inc. on October 28, 2021. The rebranding reflected chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's emphasis on building the metaverse, a proposed set of interconnected virtual and augmented-reality experiences. The Facebook social network kept its name.
The company owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger through its Family of Apps division. It also operates Reality Labs, which develops virtual-reality and augmented-reality hardware and software, including the Quest headset family.
The company itself was not founded as Meta. Facebook launched from Harvard University in 2004, with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes among its founders. The 2021 change was a corporate rebrand, not the creation of a new publicly traded company.