Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) perpetual market

Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, a family of apps used by billions of people that together form one of the world's largest advertising businesses. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 as Facebook, it grew from a college social network into a global platform and expanded through the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Nearly all its revenue comes from targeted digital advertising across its apps. In 2021 it renamed itself Meta to signal a long-term, costly bet on the metaverse and virtual and augmented reality through its Reality Labs division, though that effort has yet to pay off. More recently Meta has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, both to sharpen ad targeting and content recommendations and to build AI assistants and open large language models. Zuckerberg retains voting control, and Meta remains a mega-cap pillar of major indices.