The social media giant Meta née Facebook has seen its share of highs and lows throughout the last decade of being a publicly-traded company. Acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus helped the company spark massive growth, but the brand has not been without a lot of controversy in its last 10 years. Cheddar News anchors Kristen Scholer and Hena Doba broke down the history of the tech giant since taking the plunge as a publicly-listed company.

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Facebook Parent Meta Is Celebrating 10th Anniversary as Public Company

Okay, well 10 years ago today facebook made its Wall Street debut on the NASDAQ and over the course of this past decade, many people hit the like button but others most certainly have not to explain. Let's turn the clock back to May 18th of 2012. We're going way back and to say that the facebook I. P. O. Was highly anticipated would be an understatement. By the time of its I. P. O. Facebook had long established its popularity with college students and Ceo Mark Zuckerberg was already looking for the next big trend which at this time it was being able to monetize facebook on smartphones. There was so much conversation around mobile. Well Facebook raising a whopping 16 billion in the debut and to put that into context, it is still the largest tech I. p. o in history. 10 years later the I. P. O. Also ranking third among all publicly traded companies with its platform being used by 500 million people worldwide and bringing in $1 billion in quarterly sales. Facebook's first year on Wall Street wasn't exactly smooth though. In fact it was honestly a bit of a mess. Startup trading was delayed to what the NASDAQ turned to quote technical air and quote, I remember that resulting in some orders not going through and then within three months the stock had lost roughly half of its value. As investors grew concerned that facebook's hype growth would disappear with consumers flocking to smartphones obviously Zuckerberg and facebook putting those concerns to bed headed clearly in the years to come clearly and one way facebook was able to continue its rapid growth Kristen was through acquisitions the most notable of course being instagram facebook actually acquired the photo sharing platform months before its I. P. O. And in retrospect got quite a steal. The purchase was a mere $1 billion Facebook's largest acquisition at least at the time. The move fueled Facebook's mobile president and helped catapult Instagram's valuation to $100 billion 2018 Facebook didn't stop there. A pair of major acquisitions in 2014 grew its user base even more. It bought mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion. Facebook also acquired Oculus VR which was the company's initial leap into the metaverse but we'll dig into that in just a moment. Let's zero in on WhatsApp and that acquisition which did come with some controversy Brian Acton he was the co founder of WhatsApp explaining to Forbes in an interview why he decided to leave Facebook and $850 million dollars on the table. He said this quote I sold my user's privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. I lived with that every day actions actions sentiment didn't go away at least not quickly in 2018 when facebook was embroiled in scandal actually act and then tweeted this it is time hashtag delete facebook. I do remember that kristen I know you did too. It's something we covered here on cheddar news and the sentiment was shared by many, many people around the world after that acquisition. I would say it wasn't just such a unfortunate departure or not so smooth departure with the WhatsApp co founders but also with instagram, right, that was a little bit more hush hush. But some inside reporting did show that there was basically a culture clash between the instagram heads. Those who had founded instagram and Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg of course, ultimately winning out. But those instagram founders basically departing and not necessarily on the best of terms. Okay, well Hannah, you mentioned the word scandal earlier and here's what we're talking about. So as you see, facebook's success has also been mired in controversy. A large chunk Of revolved around that revolved around the 2016 presidential election, Russian manipulation, impacting stories that appeared on users feeds and reports in 2018 revealing that up to 87 million users were impacted by a data breach and of course whistleblower, Francis, pathogens. a testimony about the social media giant. Well this all isn't going away either, turns out facebook also the subject of multiple antitrust lawsuits including one by the FTC alleging the platform has a buy or bury ethos when it comes to acquisitions. Um, what I'll say at least thus far is certainly the Francis how jin testimony was not a good look for facebook as certainly the activity happening on some of its social media platforms namely instagram the expose by the Wall Street Journal, impacting teen girls and the mental health of vulnerable Children. Not a good look either. From a business standpoint though, we'll wait to see if anything really actually comes with these antitrust suits facebook still a cash cow here. It did get slapped with a fine several years ago before the pandemic, but it was really just a drop in the bucket. Nothing that would actually change the course of direction for this company just yet. And you mentioned those scandals Kristen when you're a company like facebook mired in scandal and you're facing challenges like this one. What could one solution be? How about a name change the company rebranding as Meta last October but the decision is also forward looking the company turning its focus to the digital world, something Mark Zuckerberg believes will be the future of the Internet. Just take a look at the video on your screen, investors may not be seeing things the same way though, shares this year down by 42%. Still meta has a stronghold over the social media spectrum. There's no denying that facebook instagram WhatsApp ranking among the top six most used apps in the world And with that of course comes a lot of controversy that you and I just talked about Kristen and a lot of criticism with, there's so much data on reports coming out that facebook specifically, especially I should say I did have a hard time when it came to getting misinformation out there and not being able to handle a lot of people. A lot of the misinformation that was being posted on their sites. You know I think the most surprising thing to me hand out over these past 10 years. Two things one how that completely botched I. P. O. I remember I was here at the new york stock exchange. It was a NASDAQ IPO's not in new york stock exchange IPO's they were all on the west coast in Silicon Valley. Said to celebrate this. It was a mess. No one even remembers that anymore. No the second part is especially when it comes to what facebook's done in terms of basically copying Snapchat that that doesn't continue to be a bigger story. I mean basically Evan Spiegel and snap said facebook ripped off my I. P. And that has allowed it to be so successful on a platform like instagram which now does give Tiktok a run for its money. So that's the other thing I think here that somehow just continues to be okay in the whole situation not to mention real that I feel like it's totally copying Tiktok. So we've seen that a lot when it comes to facebook