Facebook becomes youngest company to hit $1 trillion valuation
Facebook stock has gained 90 percent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. Since the start of the pandemic, its market cap has more than doubled.
Facebook's market cap has crossed $1 trillion for the first time after a US federal court dismissed two antitrust cases against the social networking giant.
The Menlo Park-headquartered company is currently valued at $1.008 trillion, the youngest of the Silicon Valley tech giants to cross the 13-figure valuation.
The Mark Zuckerberg-owned firm joins Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in the $1 trillion club. It took 17 years to reach there.
On Monday, Facebook stock gained 4.2 percent swelling the company's valuation and Zuckerberg's own fortune. He is now the world's fifth richest person with an estimated net worth of $131 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Incidentally, Facebook's valuation has more than doubled since the onset of the pandemic (in March 2020), as more and more people use its diversified network of apps to stay in touch with friends and family in a socially distant world.
The social network had over 2.85 billion monthly active users in Q1 2021.
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Facebook had debuted on the bourses in 2012, with a market cap of $104 billion, in what was then among the hottest tech IPOs of the world.
Its stock plummeted nearly 20 percent in 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal that eroded $100 billion off its market cap and several billions off Zuckerberg's net worth.
The company even dealt with a #DeleteFacebook movement the same year, as hordes of social media users, especially in the US, urged each other to uninstall the app after a little nudge from WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton (who left Facebook).
However, Facebook managed to turn a corner in the last 2-3 years as it shifted revenue focus to Instagram, WhatsApp Business, Oculus, Portal, Facebook Shops, and other new divisions — away from its native social network. The company managed to bump up its stock price by 90 percent since July 2018.
Most recently, Facebook previewed its live audio rooms feature in select markets to tap into the frenzy of social audio apps triggered by a16z-backed Clubhouse.
Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta