Meta Platforms is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and trades under the ticker META.
The company was formerly called Facebook, Inc. It changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms in October 2021 to emphasize its broader ambitions beyond the Facebook social network. The Facebook app kept its name, while the corporate parent adopted Meta.
Meta’s market capitalization is influenced by advertising across its family of apps, user engagement, operating costs, and expectations for newer areas such as virtual and augmented reality. Its Reality Labs division develops hardware and software connected with those ambitions.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in 2004. Meta acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, bringing major global communication platforms into the same corporate group.