How Facebook Became Meta
Meta is a company everyone knows (literally, everyone). But, somehow, it’s also a company that few people feel they actually understand. Their products are used by more humans than any other’s in history — almost half of the entire world’s population daily. But… what is Meta? Why do they do what they do? How do they do what they do? Ask ten people and you’ll likely get ten very different sets of answers.
Today, we dive deeper than we’ve ever gone trying to find Acquired’s answers to those questions. And after months of research and 6+ hours of incredible stories about how they (and really “they” being Mark himself) bet it all and win time and time again in the face of overwhelming odds, we arrive at our answers. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, AI, Oculus, Orion, it’s all here. Tune in for one of the greatest corporate stories of all time: Meta, a Mark Zuckerberg Production.
More on the episode
Links
- Please take our 2024 Acquired Survey if you have a minute. It'd mean the world to us!
- Our past episodes on Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Snapchat, the Snap IPO, TikTok, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the Mark Zuckerberg Interview
- Worldly Partners: Meta multi-decade study
Carve Outs
corrections
- It turns out that Facebook actually did launch ads without needing to be social ads. They used targeting based on profile attributes. Amazingly, these ads were actually available in the newsfeed! That was quickly removed so few people even at the company remember it.
- We erred in referring to Facebook Live as a failure. It was actually quite successful outside the US (across both Facebook and Instagram).
