Yahoo Finance 5 surprising facts about Facebook
Few things in this world are bigger than Facebook (FB). Since its launch in 2004, the social-networking site has grown to epic proportions—it now has 936 million daily active users and over 10,000 employees. Mark Zuckerberg is on track to soon become one of the ten richest people in the world.
While you’re likely very familiar with the site, we’ve compiled some interesting info that you might not know about Facebook and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Below are five facts about Facebook that might surprise you:
1. Facebook now has a market cap of $249 billion, and as of Tuesday the company is officially larger than Walmart (WMT), which has a $233 billion market cap. The social media site has replaced the big box retailer as one of the 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 (^GSPC). By revenue, Walmart is still the largest company worldwide with a $476 billion in sales, blowing Facebook’s $12.5 billion out of the water.
Mark Zuckerberg, however, is now richer than the richest member of the Walton family.
2. Facebook employs non-traditional recruiting methods. In 2005, Chris Putnam, a college student attacked Facebook with a virus that made its pages resemble MySpace. Instead of taking legal action, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz began messaging with Putnam and eventually persuaded him to drop out of school and work at Facebook as an engineer.
3. Facebook treats hackers and programmers well. The company encourages users to look for bugs on the website and rewards people who find them with a prize of at least $500, often more. In 2014, the company paid out $1.3 million to 321 bug-catchers.
4. Facebook goes the extra mile to protect its brand. The company owns about 1900 domain names including the following:
IHateTheFacebookLikeButton.com
LikeButtonSucks.com
LikeSucks.com
FacebookCreditsSuck.org
FBCreditsSuck.org
IHateFacebookCredits.com
They also own FB.com and the domain names for common misspellings of Facebook.
5. Mark Zuckerberg’s Hungarian Sheepdog, Beast, currently has 2.1 million followers on Facebook. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, run the page and post photos of the shaggy white dog regularly.
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