On Monday, Facebook's stock rose 4.2%, closing at $355.64, giving Facebook a $1T market cap for the first time, the fifth US company to hit the milestone
The irony: The milestone was achieved following a federal judge's dismissal of an antitrust complaint from the FTC, which sent shares up. https://www.axios.com/... Caleb Watney / @calebwatney : Extremely funny to me that the event which tips Facebook to being a trillion-dollar company for the first time is a court ruling saying they aren't viewed as a monopoly https://twitter.com/... Dan McCormick / @damccormick13 : Today Facebook became the youngest company ever to hit a trillion dollar market cap. 1. Facebook (17 yrs) 2. Google (21 yrs) 3. Amazon (24 yrs) 4. Apple (42 yrs) 5. Microsoft (44 yrs) s/o Zuck & The Boys for creating the greatest money printing machine the world has ever known Yung📉walken / @as_a_worker : what can account for such a valuation on an advertising platform except a dearth of arenas for productive investment in value creation? (for reference, the value of ALL global steel production last year was $290 billion!) Stefan Smith / @thestefansmith : All it cost was American democracy. https://twitter.com/... Ari Levy / @levynews : $1 million isn't cool. You know what's cool? https://www.cnbc.com/... Stacy Mitchell / @stacyfmitchell : This is exactly why Congress must pass the #BigTechBills. The courts have a deeply ingrained affinity for concentrated private power and a reflexive impulse to dismiss challenges to it. And it's not just on the right. This judge is an Obama appointee. https://twitter.com/... Sacha Baron Cohen / @sachabaroncohen : In college, Mark Zuckerberg built a website to rank women on their looks. Today, he makes $ from Facebook groups where men plot violence against women. #StopHateForProfit https://twitter.com/... @econ_marshall : Very hard to reconcile a $1 trillion market cap with the absence of monopoly power. https://twitter.com/... Rich Greenfield / @richlightshed : Look at how the gap is widening between tech platforms and everyone else in the broader media space With $FB now one of five over $1 trillion market cap — Facebook more than 3x $DIS https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Quantian / @quantian1 : Monopolist's shares rise on dismissal of antitrust lawsuit, Axios reporters baffled as to why. https://twitter.com/... Jon Erlichman / @jonerlichman : Time to reach $1 trillion market cap: Facebook: 17 years Google: 21 years Amazon: 24 years Apple: 42 years Microsoft: 44 years Brian Fung / @b_fung : The dismissal of the FTC's Facebook complaint comes as Facebook's market cap hit $1 trillion for the first time: https://www.cnn.com/... Mark Zuckerberg must be feeling pretty good right about now. Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : 10 years ago Google planned to use their market dominance to squash Facebook with the introduction of Google+. Today $FB at all time high after crossing $1 trillion in market cap. The race between startups & incumbents is always speed vs distribution and startups have the edge. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook’s climb to $1 trillion follows an earlier $500 billion market-cap milestone and strong reported growth in 2018. The immediate catalyst is a federal judge’s dismissal of the FTC complaint, tying investor confidence directly to the limits of the agency’s case.
Related coverage frames the ruling as more than a Facebook event: the FTC dismissal exposed the difficulty of prevailing under existing antitrust law, while Facebook’s advertising outlook was described as resilient despite regulatory pressure.
First-order effects
- Facebook gains a $1 trillion valuation after its shares rise on the FTC complaint’s dismissal, while the FTC loses its current court challenge against the company.
Second-order effects
- Congress faces added pressure to pursue tougher antitrust rules, as the related coverage identifies the ruling as evidence that existing law makes charges against major platforms hard to sustain.
Third-order effects
- If court setbacks continue to shape enforcement, platform competition policy will shift more decisively from agency litigation toward legislative attempts to redefine what conduct antitrust law reaches.
The trend: Big-platform valuations are increasingly reacting not only to operating growth but also to whether current antitrust law can constrain their market power.