Revenue 2024: US$164.5 billion (€152 billion)

Overview

Withover three billion monthly active users (as at the end of June 2023), more people have a Facebook account than the combined populations of India and China. With other meta-apps such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Threads, that makes 3.88 billion, almost half of the world's population (which, according to the UN, was just over eight billion in 2023). Facebook has long been more than just a tool for chatting with friends or uploading photos. The company, part of the Big Five of the major technology groups (Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft), controls numerous other communication channels following a rapid expansion, has invested heavily in virtual reality technology and has revolutionised the way media content is consumed via the internet.

General Information

Headquarters
1 Hacker Way
Menlo Park, California 94025
USA
Telephone: 001 650 543 4800
Internet: investor.fb.com

Branches of trade: social networks, messenger services
Legal form: Stock Company
Financial year: 01.01. – 31.12.
Founding year: 2004

Basic economic data (in US$ million)

	2024	2023	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018
Revenue	164.501	134.902	116.609	117.929	85.695	70.697	55.838
Profit	62.360	39.098	23.200	39.370	29.146	18.485	22.112
Stock price (year end)	585,51	351,95	120,34	336,35	273,16	208,67	137,95
Employees	74.067	67.317	86.482	71.970	58.604	44.942	35.587

Executives and Directors

Management:

• Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
• Javier Olivan, Chief Operating Officer
• Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs
• Susan Li, Chief Financial Officer
• Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer
• Jennifer Newstead, Chief Legal Officer
• Lori Goler, Head of People

Board of Directors:

• Marc Zuckerberg, Meta
• Sheryl K. Sandberg
• Peggy Alford
• Marc L. Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz
• John Arnold, Arnold Ventures
• Andrew W. Houston, Dropbox, Inc.
• Nancy Killefer
• Robert M. Kimmitt, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP
• Hock E. Tan, Broadcom
• Tracey T. Travis, The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc.
• Tony Xu, DoorDash

History

In October 2003, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg gained access to the university server and was able to post thousands of student photos on a website called "Facemash". The aim was to rate the people in the pictures (over 20,000) according to their "attractiveness". After just a few hours, the site had around 500 visitors. Although the data theft was discovered and Zuckerberg had to apologise to his fellow students, the experiment showed how much potential there was in such an online directory. In February 2004, the prototype called Thefacebook.com went online exclusively for Harvard students. It took less than two weeks for two thirds of the student body to be registered. Zuckerberg recruited his fellow students Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin to help him develop further applications for the site. Gradually, other universities were given their own Facebook network. Stanford and Yale were the first to do so; three months later, 30 universities already had a Facebook community.

Sean Parker, co-founder of the music exchange Napster, put them in touch with Peter Thiel, President of Clarium Capital, who was the first investor to invest USD 500,000 in venture capital. The Facebook team decided to leave university, like Bill Gates, to concentrate on the development of Facebook. From then on, things went from strength to strength: in November 2004, the millionth user registered and in May 2005, the young company received a further financial injection of USD 13 million from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Zuckerberg hired more Internet engineers (including Steve Chen, who would later cause a furore with the video portal YouTube). By the end of 2005, Facebook had five million users. The number continued to rise when the site was opened up to high school students and a photo function was integrated.

In September 2006, all access barriers were removed. This led to an increase in membership, which was met with scepticism by the original student users. There was an initial uproar in the community when new features called "News Feed" and "Mini Feed" were added to the profiles of Facebook users. All of a sudden, short news items about internal Facebook activities and changes made by friends and acquaintances appeared on every user profile. User anger was so great that 700,000 people joined the "Students Against Facebook News Feed" group. Zuckerberg admitted mistakes and promised to protect privacy better in future. Data protectionists also came forward with criticism. Facebook operators were accused of irresponsible handling of personal data. Media reports about prosecutions and arrests of American teenagers posing with alcohol and drugs on Facebook became more frequent. Universities and companies banned the use of Facebook, e.g. because teachers or superiors were being defamed.

In November 2007, Zuckerberg further tested the limits of user tolerance when he introduced a new feature called "Beacon": a marketing tool that informed a user's friends as soon as they purchased a product from a manufacturer that had entered into a partnership with Facebook via Facebook. The anti-Beacon movement of Facebook users and data protectionists criticised the fact that the ad programme had been launched without user consent. Two weeks after the launch, a modified version appeared. The reason for this was not so much the protests of non-governmental organisations, but the unrest that had arisen due to the negative publicity on the part of the Beacon partner companies.

At the end of 2008, Facebook had 145 million members. In 2010, David Fincher's film "The Social Network" was released, a Hollywood portrait of Mark Zuckerberg that clearly showed Facebook's growing importance in society. At the end of 2010, there were 500 million Facebook members. In 2012, the company went public. The share price initially fluctuated alarmingly, particularly because Facebook could not find an effective way to monetize the growing mobile use of its services. The issue price on May 18, 2012 was 38 US dollars; four months later, the share had lost almost 50 percent of its value. Although the company had already bought the competing social network Instagram for $737 million in September 2012, and a billion users were reported in September 2012, it was only with the development of the Android interface Facebook Home and especially after the spectacular takeover of the messaging service WhatsApp (for $19 billion in February 2014) that Facebook was able to expand its influence on smartphone screens. This led to a steady increase in the share price. Facebook also entered the consumer electronics market with the purchase of the virtual reality company Oculus (also in 2014). The Oculus Rift VR glasses, which came onto the market in 2016, were aimed primarily at PC gamers. 

However, the company suffered a setback in 2016 in its attempt to recruit the next billion Facebook users in emerging and developing countries. The Indian government refused to approve Facebook's Free Basics service (formerly Internet.org). The official goal was to connect the remaining two-thirds of the world's population without an Internet connection to the Internet. Critics accused the campaign of being nothing more than a neo-colonial plan disguised as a charity that violated net neutrality principles in order to obtain the lucrative personal data of millions of users.

Criticism of Facebook for inadequate data protection, abuse of market position, fake news and propaganda has become a constant topic. As early as 2015, Facebook’s growing importance as a news channel was documented by the Reuters Institute in Oxford. According to the study, 23 percent of 1,969 people of all ages surveyed across Germany got their news from their Facebook timeline. In the USA, the corresponding figure was 41 percent of 23,557 respondents. In May 2016, Facebook’s growing power to influence opinion was discussed for the first time in the US Congress. The reason for this was a report in the technology blog Gizmodo, according to which the company systematically censored news and opinion articles with a “conservative stance” and removed them from the news feed. Algorithms based on popularity did not determine what made it onto the user’s “front page”, but rather – as in a traditional newspaper editorial office – the political preferences of the responsible Facebook employees. Certain topics were allegedly actively introduced into the news feed for political reasons. In 2017, Facebook had two billion users worldwide.

Another darker site of social media came to light in 2018 with the documentary “The Cleaners”: It was about so-called Cleaners, who rated photos and videos on Facebook in Manila, which were supposed to cleanse Facebook of "spawn of human abysses". Quote Timothy Garton Ash about Facebook: "The biggest cesspool in human history". Or: "Facebook Is Terrible Not Because It's Evil, But Because It's Terrible", as Forbes headlined in January 2018. In general, 2018 was to be "the worst year in Facebook's corporate history" (Handelsblatt, 20.1.2019), with the scandal surrounding the British data analysis company Cambridge Analytica. The Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie, then working at Cambridge Analytica, uncovered the illegal use of the data of up to 87 million Facebook users in March 2018. Data that was then used via so-called microtargeting in the 2016 US election campaign, potential voters were to be influenced - in favor of Donald Trump. However, the data collectors are unlikely to have decided the election, said Elizabeth Denham, head of the British data protection authority ICO, at the end of 2020. There was a lot of hot air in the Cambridge Analytica story. Facebook still had to pay: a 500,000 pound fine in Great Britain and a five billion dollar fine in the USA. In the summer of 2018, Facebook shares crashed: from around 210 US dollars on July 16 to 125 dollars on December 17.

Then Facebook announced that it would hire editors for its own news section from autumn 2019. There would no longer be automatic news selection, but rather "less than ten journalistic veterans" (according to the New York Times) who would select the articles for Facebook. And Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, boss and guru, would, as editor-in-chief, have a say in which news over two billion people read every day. So much for "Facebook's transformation from a pure technology company to a media group". And Facebook's live video feature could transform the social network into a kind of online TV channel in the long term. Facebook already pays media outlets such as the New York Times and Vox.com to produce content for live video. The company also wants to pay celebrities to use the video app. CEO Zuckerberg has reportedly made video streaming his top priority, also of course to compete with the live video offensives of Twitter ("X") and Snapchat.

Facebook had more followers worldwide than Christianity or Islam. The comparison between religions and sects is obvious - for example, when Facebook promises salvation for the 21st century with the slogan "an open and connected world". Given its enormous size, there were increasing calls for the tech giant to be broken up. Roger McNamee, a long-time Zuckerberg supporter, was the first in March 2019, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes followed suit in May and called for the separation of Instagram and WhatsApp; Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren also spoke out in favor of a separation. At the beginning of October 2020, members of the Subcommittee on Competition in the US House of Representatives published a 449-page report. They had spent over a year investigating the major tech companies Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple and concluded that they were once again dealing with monopolists like in the days of oil barons and railroad magnates, with overpowering platforms with a gatekeeper position that ultimately had to be threatened with break-up.

management

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (born 1984 in White Plains, New York) began working with codes and programming languages ​​at the age of eleven. His first project was a computer version of the board game "Risk," which the college dropout with knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek set in the time of the Roman Empire. He founded Facebook in 2004, and in 2010 he was named "Person of the Year" by Time Magazine. In October 2023, Zuckerberg had a total fortune of 110.9 billion US dollars. According to Forbes' "real-time Billionaires list," this meant he was the eighth richest person in the world. Just ahead of Bill Gates (109.2 billion US dollars).

Former Google manager Sheryl Sandberg (born 1969 in Washington, D.C.) has been in charge of day-to-day operations (COO) since 2008 and was responsible for advertising strategy, personnel decisions and lobbying. While Mark Zuckerberg takes care of the technical side and the company's external image, it was Sheryl Sandberg who turned a $56 million loss-making business (2008) into a billion-dollar profit machine. In 2022, Sandberg was ranked 18th among "America's Richest Self-Made Women" (Forbes) with a fortune of $1.6 billion; she is considered a representative of a new American women's movement. In 2015, her book "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead" was also published in German. In June 2022, Sandberg announced that she would be giving up her role as co-managing director in the fall to devote more time to her foundation. She will remain on the Meta Board of Directors.

Business Units

Facebook app
The social network or rather the mother of all social networks reached more than three billion users in the summer of 2023, logging in on mobile phones and PCs every month. A core area here is the news feed, which presents users with individualized and algorithm-based articles and advertising. In the USA, for example, the Washington Post, the financial service Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and CBS News cooperate with Facebook. These publishers are then paid to have their content available on Facebook News.

In Germany (as well as in Great Britain, France, India and Brazil), Facebook News was introduced in May 2021. Here in Germany with partners such as Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Funke Media Group, Gruner + Jahr, Handelsblatt Media Group, Ippen Digital and Tagesspiegel. With regional and local media partners such as Rheinische Post, Mediengruppe Oberfranken, DDV Mediengruppe, Olympia Verlag/Verlag Nürnberger Presse, Morgenpost Verlag, Neue Pressegesellschaft, Verlagsgruppe Passau and VRM. Additional editorial content is provided by, for example, Conde Nast, Sport1 Medien, Motor Presse Stuttgart, Res Publica Verlag and Heise Medien.

WhatsApp
instant messaging-Service for text, image, video and audio messaging, founded in 2009 in Santa Clara, California, by Jan Koum and Brian Acton. Acquired by Facebook in 2014 for 19 billion US dollars, since 2015 "the world's most popular messaging application" with over two billion users (as of 2023).

Messenger
Facebook Messenger is an application for sending texts, pictures, music and videos, and voice and video calls are also possible. Originally released in 2008 as Facebook Chat, Facebook Messenger was the second most downloaded mobile app between 2011 and 2021 with 1.3 billion users (as of 2021), ahead of the messenger services Weixin/WeChat and QQ (China), Telegram (Dubai) and Snapchat (USA).

Instagram
Thanks in part to Instagram, the Oxford English Dictionary chose "selfie" as the word of the year in 2013. The social network developed by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, which has been part of Facebook since 2012 (purchase price: approx. 737 million dollars) and is mainly used for sharing photos and short videos, now has around one billion active users worldwide, and over 27.5 million users in Germany (as of 2023).

Furthermore:
The Facebook subsidiary Oculus (founded in 2012, bought in 2014 for 2.3 billion US dollars), which is active in the field of virtual reality and develops and sells VR headsets, apps and games; the B2B platform Workplace for internal company communication; “video-calling devices” developed under the Portal brand.

Current developments

At the end of October 2021, the FAZ report: "Mark Zuckerberg is distancing himself from himself. He is renaming his company and choosing the less loaded Meta as the new name." Meta or the so-called Metaverse: a virtual world that people can access via various devices. "Much of this will be mainstream in five to ten years," says Zuckerberg. The daily commute to work, for example, could then be unnecessary. According to Zuckerberg, this is a blessing for society and the environment.

In 2022, however, the era that the Big Tech companies from the USA shaped “economically and innovatively”, when Facebook (and Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) were stock market stars, seemed to be coming to an end, according to Die Zeit on December 11, 2022: “At the beginning of 2022, the shares of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta have plunged into an unexpected downward spiral after these companies have delighted their investors with exorbitant price increases for a decade. But the stock market year ends in a veritable crash for them, just like for the overwhelming rest of the tech industry.” Alphabet has fallen by 33 percent since January, Apple by 21, Microsoft by 27, Amazon by 48, Meta has even plummeted by 66 percent. Price losses that were hardly thought possible. “The Big Tech boom is over, and Wall Street knows it,” described the industry medium Re/code the crash.

The dpa report from November 9, 2022, was in line with this: Mark Zuckerberg admitted to having overestimated the online boom at the beginning of Corona. "The development of virtual worlds under the keyword metaverse" is also consuming more and more money. In the largest job cuts in Facebook's history, he laid off over 11,000 employees, about 13 percent of the workforce.

However, we now know that the volatile meta share price had already reached its lowest point at US$90.79 on October 31, 2022 (when it had fallen from US$378 on September 6, 2021 to a quarter). When it rose to US$595.94 on October 4, 2024, Bloomberg even reported that Zuckerberg had become the second richest person in the world, ahead of Jeff Bezos (Amazon). In the short term, at least.