Here's How Long It Took Facebook To Reach A $100B Market Cap

Nearly a decade.

Facebook, Inc.'s FB origin story is well known. In February 2004, Mark Zuckerburg and a group of fellow Harvard students transformed Facemash, a website for students to compare the attractiveness of their peers, into a school-wide social network. The site quickly evolved beyond its narrow scope and beyond Harvard.

By June, Peter Thiel led the company’s seed round with a $500,000 angel investment. A year later, venture capital firm Accel Partners made a $12.7 million investment, which pressed Facebook’s valuation to $98 million. By 2006, a Series B funding round brought that value to $500 million, and in 2007, a Microsoft MSFT stake of $240 million raised the value to $15 billion.

Exponential Growth

In its early years, Facebook focused on increasing access to high school students and people beyond college both in the U.S. and abroad. It added a news feed, mobile service, video chat, messenger app and other platform features.

In 2009, Facebook began its acquisition spree of various analytics, contact-importing, photo-sharing and marketplace services.

The company didn’t go public until February 2012, when it reported 845 million monthly active users and 2.7 billion daily interactions. At $38 per share, Facebook boasted the U.S.’s third largest public offering, and its market value spiked to $104 billion — higher than that of McDonald’s Corp MCD, Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN and most other U.S. companies.

It went on to purchase Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus VR, and its market cap surged beyond $600 billion.

Privacy concerns, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, caused a slow in user growth in 2018 that erased more than $120 billion from the firm’s value. Its current cap is about $483 billion.

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