Meta Platforms is the parent of Instagram and WhatsApp and changed its corporate name in 2021.
The company was founded as Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in 2004. It acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, expanding from a social-networking site into a large family of communication and media services.
In October 2021, Facebook Inc. changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms, Inc. The Facebook social network kept the Facebook name, while Meta emphasized the company’s broader interest in the metaverse, virtual reality, augmented reality, and other long-term computing platforms.
Meta’s major services include Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. It also owns Reality Labs, which develops products such as Quest virtual-reality headsets. Meta is frequently ranked among the world’s largest public companies by market capitalization. The corporate rebrand did not mean that Facebook itself was renamed Instagram or that the individual services became separate public companies.