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The Rise of Facebook — A 20-Part Series

The Rise of Facebook

How did a website built in a Harvard dorm room to rank classmates — and rejected a billion-dollar buyout at 22 — grow into a platform used by more than three billion people, survive a mobile crisis and a data scandal, and bet its entire identity on a virtual world?

This is The Rise of Facebook, a 20-part series tracing the whole arc: from Facemash and TheFacebook, through the News Feed revolt, the Instagram and WhatsApp deals, the IPO flop and the mobile pivot, Cambridge Analytica, the Meta rebrand, and the AI reinvention. A new part publishes regularly — bookmark this page to follow along.

The full series

  1. Part 1: Facemash — 2003: a Harvard sophomore, a hacked website, and a night that nearly got him expelled
  2. Part 2: TheFacebook — February 2004: launching in a dorm room and spreading across campuses
  3. Part 3: Dropping the 'The' — Palo Alto, Sean Parker, and Peter Thiel's first $500K
  4. Part 4: The News Feed Revolt — 2006: the feature everyone hated, then couldn't live without
  5. Part 5: Turning Down a Billion — 2006: why a 22-year-old said no to Yahoo's $1B offer
  6. Part 6: Opening the Platform — 2007: apps, virality, and the Beacon privacy disaster
  7. Part 7: Enter Sheryl Sandberg — 2008: building the advertising machine that would print money
  8. Part 8: The Social Network — The lawsuits, the movie, and the myth of the founding
  9. Part 9: Move Fast and Break Things — The growth machine that hit half a billion users
  10. Part 10: Buying Instagram — 2012: $1 billion for a 13-person photo app with no revenue
  11. Part 11: The IPO That Flopped — May 2012: the biggest tech IPO ever, and the crash that followed
  12. Part 12: Betting Everything on Mobile — The pivot that saved the company from itself
  13. Part 13: WhatsApp for $19 Billion — 2014: the most expensive acquisition in the company's history
  14. Part 14: The Oculus Bet — 2014: buying a VR startup and a decade-long obsession
  15. Part 15: Cambridge Analytica — 2018: 87 million profiles and the scandal that changed everything
  16. Part 16: Hauled Before Congress — Elections, misinformation, and 'Senator, we run ads'
  17. Part 17: The Antitrust Reckoning — 2020: the FTC, the states, and the case to break it up
  18. Part 18: Becoming Meta — 2021: a new name and a $10-billion-a-year bet on the metaverse
  19. Part 19: The Year of Efficiency — 2022-23: the stock collapse, mass layoffs, and the comeback
  20. Part 20: The Open-Source AI Gambit — Llama, superintelligence, and Meta's reinvention

New chapters drop regularly. Start with Part 1.

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