Meta Platforms

• 1. The Rebrand

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  On the 28th of October, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta Platforms. The timing was not coincidental. Weeks before the announcement, a former employee named Frances Haugen had handed thousands of internal documents to regulators and journalists. Those papers described a company that knew its platforms could harm users and chose growth anyway. The rebrand was framed as a commitment to building the metaverse, a digital extension of the physical world using virtual and augmented reality. But the company's core business had barely shifted. Meta sits among the six companies grouped under the label Big Tech in the United States, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Advertising accounts for 97.8 percent of its total revenue. The company was originally established in 2004 as TheFacebook, Inc., and renamed Facebook, Inc. just a year later. This documentary examines how that early project became one of the largest corporations in the world, and at what cost. The first major public test of that ambition came on the 18th of May, 2012. Facebook was set to begin trading as a public company that day, and it did not go as planned.

• 2. Going Public

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  Facebook filed for its initial public offering on the 1st of January 2012. The company's preliminary prospectus stated it had 845 million monthly active users. Every day, 2.7 billion likes and comments flowed through the site. The company sought to raise $5 billion. Underwriters priced each share at $38, valuing Facebook at $104 billion, the largest valuation ever assigned to a newly public company. That figure put the company's market capitalization above Amazon, McDonald's, Disney, and Kraft Foods. After the offering, Zuckerberg would retain 22 percent of total shares and 57 percent of total voting power.

  The New York Times wrote that the offering had transformed the company into a "must-own stock". Jimmy Lee of JPMorgan Chase called it "the next great blue-chip". Writers at TechCrunch expressed doubt, warning that "Facebook will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation". On May 16, one day before trading began, Facebook announced it would sell 25 percent more shares than originally planned. Demand was high. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third-largest in US history at the time.

  Trading began on May 18, delayed by technical problems at the Nasdaq exchange. The stock struggled to hold its $38 price, and underwriters had to buy back shares to support it. At the closing bell, shares sat at $38.23, just $0.23 above the offering price and $3.82 below the opening value. The financial press widely described the debut as a disappointment. The stock did set a new record for trading volume of an IPO.

  By May 25, shares had fallen to $31.91, a decline of 16.5 percent in the first full week.

  On May 22, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced an investigation. The question was whether banks underwriting the offering had improperly shared information with select clients rather than the general public. Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin subpoenaed Morgan Stanley over the same issue. One class action lawsuit claimed more than $2.5 billion in losses. Bloomberg estimated that retail investors may have lost approximately $630 million on Facebook stock since its debut.

  S&P Global Ratings added Facebook to its S&P 500 index on the 21st of December 2013. On the 2nd of May 2014, Zuckerberg retired the company's internal motto. "Move fast and break things" officially became "Move fast with stable infrastructure".

• 3. Billion-Dollar Bets

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  In April 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock. The photo-sharing app had launched just two years earlier. In February 2014, Facebook announced it would buy mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock. That deal was completed on the 6th of October. Later that year, Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus VR for $2.3 billion in cash and stock. Oculus released its first consumer virtual reality headset in 2016.

  In late November 2019, Facebook acquired Beat Games, the studio behind Beat Saber, one of that year's most popular virtual reality games.

  In May 2020, Facebook paid a reported $400 million in cash for Giphy, a database of animated images. The deal was integrated with the Instagram team. The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority soon concluded that the acquisition would harm competition in the display advertising market. It fined Facebook $70 million for deliberately withholding information about the deal during the investigation. In October 2022, regulators ordered Meta a second time to divest Giphy. They noted that Meta already controlled half of the advertising market in the United Kingdom. Meta agreed to the sale. In May 2023, Giphy was sold to Shutterstock for $53 million.

  In February 2022, Meta completed the acquisition of Kustomer, a customer-service platform and chatbot startup. Reports had valued Kustomer at slightly over $1 billion.

  In December 2025, Meta acquired the AI-wearables startup Limitless and the AI startup Manus AI for $2 billion. Manus had reached $100 million in recurring revenue just eight months after its launch. In June 2025, Meta committed to a multibillion-dollar investment in AI startup Scale AI. Reports indicated the financing could exceed $10 billion, which would rank it among the largest private company funding events in history.

  In January 2026, Chinese regulators began examining Meta's proposed acquisition of Manus. The concern was over cross-border transfer of artificial intelligence technology developed in China.

• 4. The Metaverse Gamble

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  In 2018, the Oculus lead Jason Rubin sent a 50-page vision document titled "The Metaverse" to Facebook's leadership. The document acknowledged that the company's virtual reality business had not caught on as expected. This was true despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on content for early adopters. Rubin urged the company to invest heavily and move quickly. His aim was for Meta to prevent its competitors from "being in the VR business in a meaningful way at all".

  In May 2019, Facebook founded Libra Networks to develop its own stablecoin cryptocurrency. Financial companies including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Uber were expected to contribute $10 million each toward a coin named Libra. The cryptocurrency was later renamed Diem. After backlash from Swiss regulators and the public, Diem was shut down and its assets sold in January 2022.

  The trademark for the word "Meta" had been registered in the United States in 2018, after an initial filing in 2015. The registrant was a Canadian company that provided big data analysis of scientific literature. That company was acquired in 2017 by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a foundation created by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. After the rebranding announcement, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said it would transfer its rights to the name to Meta Platforms. Its own Meta project would wind down in 2022.

  At Meta's 2024 Connect conference, the company presented Orion, its first pair of augmented reality glasses. Manufacturing proved too complex and costly for a consumer launch. Meta instead produced a small number of the glasses for internal use only.

  In December 2021, Elon Musk said he could not see a compelling use-case for a VR-driven metaverse. He added: "I don't see someone strapping a frigging screen to their face all day."

• 5. The Ad Machine

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  In February 2015, Facebook announced it had reached two million active advertisers, with most of the growth coming from small businesses. By March 2016, that count had reached three million, with more than 70 percent coming from outside the United States. Prices follow an auction-based model, with targeting as the central selling point. Meta reaches users through what it calls targeted audiences and "look alike" audiences, drawing on viewing habits, likes, shares, and purchasing data.

  During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of online services grew globally. Zuckerberg predicted the surge would be a "permanent acceleration" that would continue after the pandemic. Facebook hired aggressively, growing from 48,268 employees in March 2020 to more than 87,000 by September 2022.

  Apple's introduction of app tracking transparency reshaped the company's economics. Meta expected the privacy measures to cost it roughly $10 billion in advertising revenue. That sum equaled about 8 percent of Meta's total revenue for 2021. In a meeting with staff the day after earnings were reported, Zuckerberg blamed competition for user attention, particularly from TikTok.

  In July 2022, Meta recorded its first year-on-year revenue decline, with total revenue slipping 1 percent to $28.8 billion. On the 27th of October 2022, the company's market value dropped to $268 billion, a loss of roughly $700 billion compared to 2021. Its shares fell 24 percent that single day. Meta fell out of the top 20 US companies by market capitalization.

  In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, 13 percent of its workforce. Zuckerberg said the decision to aggressively increase the company's investments had been a mistake. He had wrongly predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic's e-commerce surge would last. He also cited "ads signal loss" as a factor.

  In 2024, the United States contributed $59.7 billion in revenue, or 36.3 percent of the total. Europe contributed $38.4 billion, or 23.3 percent. Asia-Pacific excluding China contributed $26.7 billion, or 16.2 percent.

  Internal documents analyzed by Reuters showed that Meta projected 10 percent of its 2024 revenue would come from scam ads and prohibited goods. That 10 percent represented roughly $16 billion. The company estimated this represented 15 billion higher-risk scam ads displayed per day. Meta also estimated its platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the United States. Rather than banning suspected scammers, Meta chose to charge them higher rates to reduce the profitability of their campaigns. An internal document stated that the team vetting questionable advertisers faced a hard limit. It was not permitted to take actions that would cost more than 0.15 percent of Meta's total revenue.

  As of 2022, Meta was the world's third-largest spender on research and development, with R&D expenses totaling $35.3 billion.

• 6. Under Legal Scrutiny

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  On the 8th of December 2020, the US Federal Trade Commission and 46 states launched an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. The suit alleged that Facebook held monopolistic power in the US social networking market. Regulators sought to force the company to divest both Instagram and WhatsApp. William Kovacic, a former FTC chairman, warned the case would be difficult to win. It would require the government to construct a hypothetical internet in which the three platforms had never merged. In November 2025, a court ruled that Meta had not violated antitrust laws and held no monopoly in the market.

  In March 2020, Australia's Office of the Information Commissioner sued Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The commissioner estimated that 311,127 Australians had been exposed. Each violation of Australia's Privacy Act carried a potential cumulative liability of $1.7 million.

  On the 24th of December 2021, a Russian court fined Meta $27 million for declining to remove unspecified banned content. In March 2022, Russia banned Facebook and Instagram and added Meta to its list of terrorist and extremist organizations. The government cited allegations of Russophobia and hate speech. A Moscow court upheld the ban in June of that year.

  In January 2023, Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner fined Meta €390 million for violations of European data protection rules. In May 2023, a record fine of €1.2 billion followed. Meta was penalized for transferring personal data of Facebook users to servers in the United States without adequate GDPR protections.

  In July 2024, Meta agreed to pay the state of Texas to settle a lawsuit accusing it of collecting users' biometric data without consent. The settlement set a record as the largest privacy-related payout ever obtained by a state attorney general.

  In April 2025, the European Commission fined Meta €200 million, equivalent to $230 million, for violating the Digital Markets Act. The violation involved a system requiring users to either consent to data collection for targeted ads or pay for an ad-free subscription.

  In March 2026, a New Mexico jury found that Meta had harmed children's mental health and violated state law. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in civil penalties. New Mexico also called on the court to require Meta to implement effective age verification and to protect minors from encrypted communications with predators.

  The Kenyan High Court also ruled that a lawsuit alleging Facebook had inflamed civil violence in Ethiopia in 2021 could proceed to trial.

• 7. What Gets Removed

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  According to a 2025 complaint by whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook in 2014 created an internal project code-named "Project Aldrin". The goal was to build a version of its services that could operate in China. Internal communications cited in the complaint suggested Facebook agreed to grant Chinese authorities access to Chinese users' data. This included users in Hong Kong. The company also reportedly agreed to hire 300 content moderators to support a custom censorship system. According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook restricted the account of Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman critical of the government. The purpose was to foster cooperation with Beijing. By 2019, as trade tensions between the United States and China escalated, Facebook had abandoned its China ambitions.

  In 2016, Meta hired Jordana Cutler as its policy chief for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. Cutler had previously worked at the Israeli Embassy to the United States. Critics argued that Cutler's position gave the Israeli government unusually strong influence over Meta's content policies.

  In August 2024, Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan. It stated that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration had repeatedly asked Meta to limit certain content. The requests included humor and satire about the virus.

  In January 2025, Meta ended its use of third-party fact-checkers. It replaced them with a community notes system similar to the one used on X. The decision drew criticism from fact-checking organizations, who warned it would make misinformation harder to identify. Meta also eliminated restrictions on anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant hate speech. The new hateful conduct policy explicitly allowed users to call LGBTQ people mentally ill based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

  In March 2025, Meta attempted to block former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her memoir, Careless People. The book included allegations of unaddressed sexual harassment by senior executives. The New York Times described Meta's action as among its most forcible attempts to repudiate a former employee's account of workplace dynamics. Publisher Macmillan stated it would ignore the arbitration ruling.

  From October 2025, Meta began removing and restricting accounts related to LGBTQ rights, reproductive health, and abortion information. Martha Dimitratou, executive director of Repro Uncensored, called it "one of the biggest waves of censorship we are seeing".

• 8. The AI Pivot

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  In July 2023, Meta announced Llama 2, an artificial intelligence model made available for commercial use through partnerships with cloud providers including Microsoft. It was the first project from Meta's generative AI group, established in February 2023. Unlike most commercial AI products, Llama 2 did not charge for access or usage. It operated under a source-available model, allowing Meta to observe how users applied it and where improvements were needed. An earlier version of Llama had been released only to academics. Before the Llama 2 announcement, Meta had said publicly it had no plans to release the model for commercial use.

  On the 4th of October, 2024, Meta announced Movie Gen, an AI model capable of generating realistic video and audio from user prompts. The model was built using a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets. Meta said it would not release Movie Gen for open development. Instead, it planned to collaborate directly with content creators and integrate the model into its products.

  From 2022, Meta scrambled to adopt specialized AI hardware and software. The company had been relying on cheaper CPUs rather than GPUs for AI tasks, and that approach proved less efficient. In December 2024, Meta announced a $10 billion investment in a new AI data center. The facility, described as the company's largest, would be built in northeast Louisiana and powered by natural gas.

  In February 2026, Meta announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia. According to Bridgewater Associates, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft were expected to collectively invest about $650 billion in AI-related infrastructure in 2026.

  On the 11th of March, 2026, Meta revealed a roadmap of four new chips it was developing in-house. These were part of its Meta Training and Inference Accelerator program.

  In May 2026, publishers including Macmillan, Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and McGraw Hill sued Meta. They alleged the company had used their books and journal articles without permission to train Llama. The same month, Meta laid off 8,000 workers, about 10 percent of its workforce. An internal memo emphasized that "success isn't a given" in the AI race. The company also moved 7,000 employees into AI-focused roles.

  In March 2026, regulators in the United Kingdom and the United States opened investigations into Meta's AI-enabled smart glasses. They were examining how images and videos captured by the devices might be used in developing and improving artificial intelligence systems.