Which company is the publicly traded parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp?

Meta Platforms is the publicly traded parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The company changed its corporate name from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc. in October 2021. The rebranding emphasized the company’s longer-term focus on building social, virtual-reality, and augmented-reality experiences, while Facebook remained the name of one of its major social networks.

Meta’s family of applications includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. These services give the company a very large global user base and support its principal business: selling digital advertising targeted using signals from activity across its platforms.

Meta is often compared with Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft in lists of the world’s largest companies by market capitalization. Its market value changes with investor expectations about advertising growth, user engagement, regulation, and spending on technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.