TLDR;
Facebook grew from a controversial Harvard student directory into Meta, a global technology company whose apps reach billions of people. Its rise relied on rapid expansion, mobile advertising and acquisitions, but it also brought privacy failures, political misinformation, regulatory scrutiny and questions about responsibility at enormous scale.
- Exclusive campus access helped Facebook spread rapidly before it opened to everyone.
- Mobile advertising, Instagram, WhatsApp and other products supported its growth.
- Cambridge Analytica and further safety concerns damaged its reputation, while a $5 billion fine did little to slow its expansion.
- After a difficult period, Meta cut costs and invested in AI, Reels and Threads, returning to a valuation above $1 trillion.
From Facemash to Facebook’s First Million Users [0:00]
Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984 in White Plains, New York, began coding as a child. At Phillips Exeter Academy, he made Synapse, a music player that learned users’ tastes; companies including Microsoft reportedly showed interest, but he went to Harvard in 2002. In 2003, he built Facemash, which used photos taken from Harvard’s dormitory websites to let visitors compare students’ appearance. The site attracted hundreds of visitors and thousands of photo views in hours, but Harvard shut it down and brought Zuckerberg before a disciplinary board for security and privacy violations. The episode showed him how quickly a simple website could spread and how much interest people had in other people’s lives.
Soon afterwards, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra asked Zuckerberg to programme Harvard Connection, a social network for Harvard students. While delaying that work, he built thefacebook.com, which launched on 4 February 2004 as a directory of profiles, photographs and personal details. Access required a Harvard email address, making the service feel exclusive and secure; more than 1,000 students signed up in its first day, and over half of Harvard undergraduates had joined within a month. Dustin Moskovitz helped with coding, Eduardo Saverin financed the early work and handled business matters, while Chris Hughes and Andrew McCollum also joined. Rather than launch everywhere at once, the team added campuses one by one. By the end of 2004, it had one million users.
Building a Company and Settling Early Lawsuits [3:48]
Zuckerberg and several friends moved to Palo Alto in 2004, setting up Facebook’s first headquarters in a rented house where staff worked and slept. He left Harvard to run the company full-time and met Sean Parker, Napster’s co-founder, who became Facebook’s first president and introduced him to investors. Peter Thiel invested $500,000 for roughly 10% of the company. Facebook later dropped “the” from its name and bought facebook.com for $200,000; in 2005, Accel Partners invested more than $12 million, valuing the company at about $100 million.
The fast growth deepened disputes with early partners. Saverin’s ownership share was diluted as new investors came in, and he sued after feeling pushed out; the case was settled in 2009, with his co-founder status restored and a settlement that made him a billionaire. The Winklevoss twins also sued, claiming Zuckerberg had taken their idea. Facebook settled in 2008 for about $65 million in cash and shares, and the twins later failed in an attempt to reopen the case. Facebook expanded to high-school students in 2005 and, in September 2006, to anyone over 13 with an email address.
The News Feed, Advertising and Facebook’s Rise [5:40]
Facebook’s News Feed, launched in 2006, collected friends’ updates on one page rather than requiring users to visit individual profiles. Users protested in large numbers, saying it made them feel watched. Zuckerberg apologised and added privacy controls, but kept the feature; over time, users continued using it and spent more time on the site. The episode established a pattern in which users might object loudly to changes but still adopt them. Facebook’s cleaner design and real-name policy contrasted with MySpace’s highly customised pages and helped it overtake its rival by 2009.
Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s roughly $1 billion offer in 2006, and Microsoft bought a small stake in 2007 at a valuation of $15 billion. Facebook also opened its platform to outside developers, enabling apps and games such as FarmVille. Sheryl Sandberg joined in 2008 and built the advertising business around Facebook’s ability to target people according to information such as their interests and location. The Like button arrived in 2009. By 2010, Facebook had 500 million users, and Zuckerberg had become a prominent public figure. The company’s “Move fast and break things” culture encouraged speed, but privacy was often treated as something to address later—a choice that would become a major liability.
The IPO, Mobile Shift and Acquisitions [8:31]
Facebook went public in May 2012, raising about $16 billion at a valuation above $100 billion. The launch was troubled by technical problems on the NASDAQ, and the share price fell sharply in the following months. Facebook had been built mainly for desktop computers and had little mobile advertising, while users were rapidly shifting to smartphones. Zuckerberg responded by directing engineers to focus on the phone app; mobile ads soon became Facebook’s largest source of revenue, and the shares recovered.
Facebook also bought or tried to acquire potential competitors and new technologies. It bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, when the photo-sharing app had 13 employees and no revenue, and acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for about $19 billion. That year, it also bought virtual-reality company Oculus for $2 billion. After Snapchat rejected a $3 billion offer, Facebook introduced Snapchat’s Stories feature across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, helping the products compete with Snapchat. By 2015, a billion people used Facebook in one day, and the company owned Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. Critics argued that buying or copying emerging rivals was a way to suppress future competition, an argument that later reached the courts.
Privacy Scandals, Meta and the Metaverse [10:51]
Facebook’s reputation worsened after the 2016 US election, when fake news spread on the platform and Russian groups used it in campaigns to influence voters. Zuckerberg initially dismissed the idea that Facebook had affected the election, but later said he had been wrong. In 2018, Cambridge Analytica was found to have obtained data from up to 87 million Facebook users through a personality-quiz app without their meaningful consent, then used the information to build voter profiles for political campaigns. Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress, and the scandal contributed to calls to delete Facebook.
In 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for privacy violations—the largest such fine against a technology company at the time. The company’s share price barely reacted, and critics argued that the fine was too small to force significant change. Further concerns included Facebook’s role in spreading hatred against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar and internal research indicating that Instagram could harm teenagers’ mental health. In 2021, former employee Frances Haugen released tens of thousands of internal documents suggesting the company knew about many harms and often prioritised growth over safety.
On 28 October 2021, Zuckerberg renamed the company Meta and presented the metaverse—a virtual world for work, play and socialising through headsets—as its future. Critics saw the rebrand as an attempt to move on from scandals, while investors questioned the cost: Meta was spending over $10 billion annually on virtual and augmented reality with few customers to show for it.
Meta’s Recovery and Its Expanding Reach [13:17]
Meta faced a severe downturn in 2022. Apple’s new iPhone privacy rules made it harder to track users for advertising, TikTok attracted younger audiences, and metaverse spending continued. Meta’s shares lost about three quarters of their peak value, and the company laid off 11,000 employees—around 13% of its workforce—in November. Zuckerberg called 2023 the “year of efficiency”, cutting management layers, ending projects and redirecting attention towards artificial intelligence.
The recovery came through improved AI-powered advertising, the growth of Reels as a competitor to TikTok, and Threads, which attracted over 100 million users in five days after launching in July 2023 as a rival to Twitter. Meta also released its Llama AI models openly and presented itself as a major participant in the AI race. By early 2024, its market value had exceeded $1 trillion and annual revenue had passed $160 billion, almost all from advertising. US regulators tried to force the company to separate Instagram and WhatsApp, arguing their acquisitions had been illegal, but a judge ruled in Meta’s favour.
Meta’s Power and the Question of Responsibility [14:48]
Meta’s apps now reach roughly 3.5 billion people each day, and the company is investing tens of billions of dollars in AI, smart glasses and Zuckerberg’s stated goal of “superintelligence”. In 2025, Meta paid more than $14 billion for a stake in Scale AI and hired its young founder to lead a new AI laboratory. A website that began as a way for Harvard students to compare faces had become part of how a huge share of humanity communicates, shares information, argues and shops.
The company’s history points to the advantages of launching early, moving faster than rivals, acquiring or copying threats, maintaining control and rebuilding around emerging technologies. It also leaves a central question: when a product connects the world, who is responsible for what happens on it? The platform’s influence has grown beyond what its original purpose—or perhaps its creator—could have anticipated.
