Who Owns Meta? Top Facebook Shareholders and Zuckerberg's Stake

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Mark Zuckerberg is Meta Platforms’ largest shareholder and its controlling owner. According to Meta’s definitive proxy statement dated April 1, 2025, he held about 342.61 million Class B shares and roughly 141,000 Class A shares, which gave him 61% of total voting power. That figure measures control, not the size of his economic stake. Because Meta uses a dual-class share structure, Zuckerberg’s percentage of the votes is much larger than his percentage of the company’s equity. The largest institutional owners are the big index fund managers Vanguard, BlackRock and Fidelity (FMR).

History: From Facebook to Meta

Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 in his Harvard dorm with classmates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The site started as a network for Harvard students and spread to other universities before opening to the general public.

The company’s early backers shaped its ownership long before the stock was listed. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in 2004. Accel Partners led a venture round in 2005, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in 2007, and DST Global invested in 2009. These private rounds diluted the founders over time, but Zuckerberg kept control throughout.

Facebook went public in May 2012 at $38 per share, one of the largest technology IPOs on record at the time. It bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. In 2021 Facebook Inc. renamed itself Meta Platforms Inc. to reflect its push into virtual and augmented reality, and in June 2022 the ticker changed from FB to META. Zuckerberg has served as chair and CEO since the company’s founding, so he still controls the business behind Facebook, now under the Meta name.

Business Model

Meta earns most of its money from advertising. Businesses pay to show ads to users across its apps, and Meta’s targeting tools rely on the scale and engagement of those platforms. For the trailing 12 months through September 2025, Meta reported $189.46 billion in revenue and $58.53 billion in net income.

Revenue Segments

Meta reports two segments:

• Family of Apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads. Advertising revenue comes from this segment.
• Reality Labs: virtual- and augmented-reality hardware (such as Quest headsets), software and the developer ecosystem around them. This is the unit tied to the “metaverse” strategy behind the 2021 name change.

How Meta’s Dual-Class Shares Work

The gap between Zuckerberg’s control and his economic stake comes from Meta’s two share classes:

• Class A shares trade publicly on the Nasdaq under the ticker META and carry one vote per share.
• Class B shares are not listed and carry ten votes per share. They are held mainly by Zuckerberg and a small group of insiders and early holders.

Because each Class B share carries ten times the votes of a Class A share, roughly 343 million Class B shares give Zuckerberg a majority of all votes even though the publicly traded Class A shares far outnumber them. In practice, he can decide board elections and most matters put to a shareholder vote. Other shareholders, including the giant index funds, cannot outvote him.

Can you buy Class B shares? No. Class B shares are not available on any exchange. Under Meta’s charter, Class B shares generally convert into Class A shares when they are sold or transferred, with limited exceptions such as certain estate-planning transfers. An ordinary investor who buys Meta stock receives Class A shares with one vote each.

Other large technology companies use similar structures. Alphabet’s founders keep outsized votes through high-vote shares, a setup covered in who owns Google and the largest Alphabet shareholders.

Major Shareholders

Top Individual Insider Shareholders

In SEC terms, an insider is an officer, a director, or any person or entity that owns more than 10% of a company’s registered stock. The label has nothing to do with illegal insider trading. Insiders must file an SEC Form 4 when they buy or sell company stock, usually within two business days of the trade, so their holdings are a matter of public record.

The share counts below are direct holdings reported in the April 1, 2025, proxy statement. They exclude shares held indirectly and shares the executive could acquire through stock options or unvested awards.

Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg co-founded the company and has been its chair and CEO since 2004. As of April 1, 2025, he held about 141,000 Class A shares and 342.61 million Class B shares, giving him 61% of the total voting power. His personal fortune is tied mostly to this stake, which is why his net worth moves with Meta’s share price. He sells shares periodically, and each sale appears in a Form 4 filing.

Christopher K. Cox

Chris Cox joined Facebook in 2005 as one of its early engineers, became Vice President of Product in 2008 and has been Chief Product Officer since 2014. He was the second-largest individual shareholder with 360,632 Class A shares as of April 1, 2025.

Javier Olivan

Javier Olivan joined Facebook in 2007 to lead growth and is now Meta’s Chief Operating Officer. He held 133,866 Class A shares as of April 1, 2025, making him the third-largest individual shareholder.

The gap between Zuckerberg and everyone else answers the question of who has the most stake in Facebook aside from Mark: no other individual insider holds anything close to his position, either in shares or in votes.

Top Institutional Shareholders

Institutional investors held about 78.72% of Meta’s shares outstanding as of March 2026. These are asset managers, pension funds, banks and similar firms, mostly investing on behalf of clients through mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Two disclosure rules make their holdings visible:

• Form 13F: institutional investment managers with at least $100 million in qualifying assets must report their U.S. equity holdings to the SEC every quarter.
• Schedules 13D and 13G: any investor, institutional or individual, that acquires beneficial ownership of more than 5% of a company’s voting class must file one of these forms. Schedule 13G is the shorter version for passive investors who do not seek control.

The percentages below come from aggregated filings as of March 2026 and are stated as a share of total shares outstanding as reported by those sources.

Vanguard Group Inc.

Vanguard held about 200 million Meta shares, or 8.40% of shares outstanding. It is one of the world’s largest asset managers, focused on mutual funds and ETFs, with about $12 trillion in global assets under management as of December 2025. Most of its Meta stake sits in index funds that buy the stock because Meta is in the index they track. One example is the Vanguard Communication Services ETF (VOX), where Meta was the largest holding at about 22.05% of assets as of February 2026.

BlackRock Inc.

BlackRock held about 171.5 million shares, or 7.10% of shares outstanding. It managed roughly $13.46 trillion as of October 2025 across mutual funds, iShares ETFs and closed-end funds. Its iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) is one of the largest ETFs in the world, and Meta was its eighth-largest holding at about 2.34% of assets as of March 2026. Any fund tracking the S&P 500 index owns Meta in proportion to its index weight.

FMR LLC (Fidelity Investments)

FMR LLC, the parent of Fidelity Investments, held about 122.3 million shares, or about 6.10% of the company. Fidelity provides brokerage services and investment funds and reported $17.5 trillion in total assets under administration as of the third quarter of 2025. Its funds include the Fidelity Metaverse ETF (FMET), which tracks the Fidelity Metaverse Index; Meta was its fourth-largest holding at 4.55% of assets, in a fund with $48.6 million under management as of December 31, 2025.

Other Large Holders

Other major institutional shareholders include JPMorgan Chase, State Street and Geode Capital Management. Like Vanguard and BlackRock, much of their Meta exposure comes from index and passively managed products.

Why Institutions Own More Shares but Zuckerberg Has Control

Vanguard, BlackRock and Fidelity each hold more Class A shares than any individual insider other than Zuckerberg, and together the top three institutions own about a fifth of shares outstanding. Their shares, however, carry one vote each. Zuckerberg’s Class B shares carry ten. The result is that the institutions own a large slice of Meta’s profits and dividends, while Zuckerberg decides how the company is run.

For an investor, this means a Meta share is an economic claim on a company whose strategy, board and big bets (such as the spending on Reality Labs) are set by one person. Shareholder proposals and votes can signal disagreement, but they cannot override him while his voting majority lasts. The same pattern of founder or index-fund ownership shows up across other megacaps, as in the breakdowns of Apple’s top shareholders and Nvidia’s largest shareholders, though most of those companies do not have a single controlling owner.

FAQs

The Bottom Line

Meta's ownership split matters most to anyone buying META stock, which means buying Class A shares with one vote each. Vanguard, BlackRock and Fidelity hold large economic stakes, but Zuckerberg's ten-vote Class B shares give him 61% of the votes and control over the board and strategy. Shareholder votes can signal disagreement with choices like Reality Labs spending, yet they cannot override him while that majority lasts.