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

Nearly a decade.

Facebook, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: 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 (NASDAQ: 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 (NYSE: MCD), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: 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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