Facebook was the youngest company to appear on the Fortune 500, joining the list in 2013 only nine years after its founding.
Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard students launched Facebook in 2004, initially as a college social-networking site. It expanded beyond campuses, grew rapidly through advertising, and became a public company in 2012. Based on its 2012 revenue, Facebook entered the 2013 Fortune 500 at No. 462.
The achievement was unusual because Fortune ranks companies by revenue rather than by users, valuation, cultural influence, or stock-market capitalization. Facebook’s rapid advertising growth allowed it to qualify extraordinarily soon after its creation. The company later changed its corporate name to Meta Platforms in 2021, although the Facebook service retained its familiar name.
A common mix-up is Google, which also reached the Fortune 500 relatively young and climbed quickly after appearing under the Google name. Amazon and Apple were much older entrants. Facebook’s record referred to the age of the company when it first made the U.S. Fortune 500, not the age of its founder or the age of the social-media product.