Facebook, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users as of 2020 is the world’s largest and most popular social media site. Not to mention, it in fact, has been the popular and most used social media site since its inception. The motive to connect people with each other virtually, made it famous among people. Over time, it introduced new features and products that made it even more successful.
With a huge active user base from India (290 million users), US (190 million users) followed by Indonesia, Brazil and other countries, it is a giant social space. In fact, Facebook’s population attracted businesses from all industries, and investors to make it more powerful. You can see over 60 million active businesses on the platform. In the same way there are many genius investors for the platform.
It generated over $18,687 million revenue in Q2 2020. Read Facebook Business Model here.
In 2009, Facebook had over 350 million registered users and over 132 million unique monthly users. With over a trillion page views as of 2011, Facebook had set another milestone.
Thus the company joined the giant company’s club that includes Apple, Alphabet and Amazon.
It is even estimated that Facebook would be the next $1 trillion company according to CNBC. As of 2020, Facebook has a market cap of $800.8 billion.
Thus, Facebook is an incredible creation by Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founders. However, do you wonder when did this influential platform, Facebook start and who owns it now?
Well, this article discusses those along with a few other interesting facts. So, shall we get started?
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History of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook is as popular and as rich as the platform is. The great motive behind it attracted billions of money in investments and funding. And fortunately, that made the founders into billionaires overnight. Enough said! Let’s look into how it all started.
It all began in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2003. He built a website known as “Facemash” that was similar to “Hot or Not” while attending Harvard University. The website asks users to choose the hotter one placing two persons side by side. Due to several reasons, Facemash was soon shut down. Additionally, Zuckerberg was charged for breaching security, privacy and copyrights.
However, the genius didn’t stop there. He was inspired by a student directory for featuring photos and personal information called “face book” that Harvard had only in paper version. In January 2004, he coded and created a new website called “TheFacebook” along with his college roommates and fellow students, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Andrew McCollum.
Initially, the website was accessible only for students of Harvard College and then later it expanded to Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Boston University and other universities in the US and Canada.
Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal first invested in Facebook after the company had moved to Palo Alto in 2004. In 2005, the company bought domain name Facebook.com for US$200,000 and dropped “the” from its name.
Read: PayPal Business Model – How does it Make Money
Accel Partners, in May 2005, invested $12.7 million and Jim Breyer added $1 million in Facebook making it an eligible company to enter into the big tech companies list.
Very soon after Facebook was launched, it had many business pages along with millions of individual users.
So, that is how this magical social networking service was born and made revolutionary changes to how people communicate with each other over the internet and companies communicate with its customers.
Who Owns Facebook?
Facebook, the giant social media platform has been rapidly growing since then. It went public, it received billions in funding and thus it is now a $80 billion worth company.
It introduced many innovative features such as sharing photos, videos and 3D graphics. Linking, commenting, sharing and messaging features were launched. The user base multiplied rapidly from all over the world excluding a few countries.
Moreover, the company grew so profitable that it acquired over 60 businesses. A few important acquisitions are Instagram, a famous photo-sharing app, Messenger, WhatsApp- the popular messaging apps, Oculus, a VR brand.
Read: How Instagram Makes Money
It thus attracted hundreds of investors and businesses to become partners. Now, the question arises, who actually owns Facebook.
As said, Facebook attracted many shareholders. However, the majority of shares are owned by Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg holds more than 400 millions of shares that value around $82.2 billion. Hence, he owns the majority of voting rights and thus acquired effective control of the company.
The other major shareholders are –
- Vanguard Group Inc., one of the largest investment management companies of the world holds nearly 184 million shares of Facebook.
- BlackRock Inc., which is again one of the world’s largest asset and investment management companies has over $6.47 trillion in AUM. The company’s funds hold over 158.2 million shares of Facebook that have a market value of $32.3 billion.
- FMR LLC, a popular financial services company holds nearly 123.6 million shares of Facebook that has a combined market value of $26.1 billion.
Thus the list goes on…
Bottom Line
So, that is how Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook owns Facebook. With a majority of shares and effective power of control on the company, he owns the company Facebook, Inc., that also owns other companies it acquired such as Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp etc.
