MetLife's most consequential decision of the past decade was not a product launch or an acquisition — it was the 2017 spin-off of its US retail business into a separate publicly traded company called Brighthouse Financial. By separating from the capital-intensive variable annuity liabilities and the legacy retail life insurance policies, MetLife instantly transformed its capital efficiency profile and redirected its focus toward the group benefits and institutional markets where it holds genuinely durable competitive positions. The company generated $69.8 billion in total revenues for FY2024 with net income of $6.5 billion, employing approximately 45,000 people globally across more than 40 markets. CEO Michel Khalaf leads a company that now focuses on US group benefits — employer-sponsored life, dental, disability, and accident insurance — and international markets, particularly in Asia and Latin America, where rising middle-class populations are creating insurance demand that MetLife's distribution scale can address. Founded in 1868 in New York City by Henry S. Terry and William A. Brewer as Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the enterprise grew through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by selling industrial life insurance — small-face-amount policies collected weekly by agents who visited workers' homes. By the early twentieth century, MetLife was the largest life insurer in the United States and one of the largest financial institutions of any kind. The 2000 demutualization and IPO converted MetLife from a policyholder-owned mutual company into a publicly traded corporation. That transition unlocked capital flexibility and aligned management incentives with shareholder returns rather than policyholder benefit maximization. MetLife Investment Management, the company's institutional asset management arm, deploys hundreds of billions in policyholder premium float across global credit markets, generating spread income that is the engine of the company's investment margin.