Facebook

Why bouncing back is important? From one bad idea to a blockbuster, Zuck explains it all.

While enrolled at Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg created the website “Facemash” in 2003. The website was similar to Hot or Not. The site was sent to several campus group listservs before being shut down by the Harvard administration a few days later.

As a result of FaceMash’s brief but successful operation, the founder of Facebook, Zuckerberg began to think about the advantages of developing a social network for everybody in the college.

Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to launch “TheFacebook,” – a social networking website he had created to facilitate communication among Harvard students, that first appeared at thefacebook.com.

When it went live on February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg and his roommates were transfixed to their screens, watching as an estimated 1,200–1,500 of their fellow students signed on for the site within its first day. Facebook quickly grew, and by the end of the year, Facebook had 1 million users.

Peter Thiel had contributed $500,000, and Mark Zuckerberg had quit Harvard to take over the company’s new California headquarters.  From there, Facebook became unstoppable. It grew to become not only an extremely profitable company but also one of the biggest organizations of the early 21st century.

Accel contributed $12.7 million to Facebook in May 2005, and Jim Breyer contributed an additional $1 million.

In July 2010, the business declared 500 million users. According to statistics, Facebook became the most popular website in June 2011 with 1 trillion page views. In May 2013, Facebook became a member of the Fortune 500 list for the first time. With 460 million shares traded on day one, the shares set a record for IPO trading volume.

Owner Facebook, Inc. changed its name to Meta Platforms, Inc. (or just “Meta”) in October 2021 as it shifted its emphasis to creating the “metaverse” The name of the social networking service Facebook remains unaffected by this modification. 

As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 2.96 billion monthly active users and ranked third worldwide among the most visited websites.

Facebook was the most downloaded mobile app in the decade of 2010.

– Do you have a favorite billionaire? Check out Compare Billionaires to see how they are doing today –