It started in a college dorm. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger — Meta's platforms now reach billions of people and sit inside most of the world's conversation, commerce and politics, which is an unusual amount of influence for one founder to still control personally.

That control is the point. Holding the votes lets Zuckerberg make bets no board would approve, and in 2021 he made the biggest one: renamed the company Meta and committed billions a year to virtual reality. Years later the metaverse has not come close to earning that back.

Founder control is a double-edged sword: it lets you bet the company on the future, and forces everyone to live with the bet.

Then AI arrived and he turned the ship hard. Meta released open-weight models and spent enormous sums on AI infrastructure, which put it back in a race people had assumed it was losing — and made life awkward for competitors selling closed models at a price.

An efficiency drive won the investors back after a bad stretch. Two questions stay open. Whether the metaverse money ever justifies itself, and whether an advertising engine built for the old internet still works on one increasingly mediated by AI that Meta does not own.

Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from his Harvard dormitory in February 2004 with a handful of classmates, and left the university that year to run it from Palo Alto. Early money came from Peter Thiel and then Accel. He turned down acquisition offers that would have made him rich in his early twenties, including one from Yahoo, a decision that set the pattern for how he would treat control.

Acquisitions shaped the company more than any single launch. Facebook bought Instagram for about one billion dollars in 2012, the year it went public, and WhatsApp for roughly nineteen billion in 2014. Both looked expensive at the time and both became central to the business. They also became central to the US Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case, which argued the deals were a way of neutralising rivals.

Trust has been the recurring cost. The Cambridge Analytica revelations of 2018, in which data from millions of users was harvested for political profiling, led to congressional testimony and a five-billion-dollar settlement with the FTC in 2019. In 2015 Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged to give away 99 per cent of their Facebook shares over their lifetimes through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.