Meta Platforms owns Instagram and WhatsApp and is one of the world’s largest publicly traded technology companies by market capitalization.
The company was founded as Facebook in 2004 and changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms in October 2021. The rebrand emphasized Meta’s investment in virtual and augmented reality, while Facebook remained the name of its flagship social network.
Meta acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Those services expanded its global reach beyond Facebook and helped make the company a major force in digital advertising and online communication.
Meta’s market capitalization rises and falls with its share price and investor expectations about advertising, artificial intelligence, messaging, and Reality Labs. Its market value should not be confused with the number of users across its family of apps, since users and investors measure different things.