Zuckerberg: Facebook’s New Name Will Be Meta
- The company’s shares are trading roughly 3% up, as of press time
- On Monday, Zuckerberg said the company will be spending more than $10 billion on its metaverse division
Facebook will officially change its corporate name to Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday.
According to Zuckerberg, the company decided to rebrand because the name Facebook doesn’t fully align with its future vision, adding that moving forward the tech giant will be “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA, we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started,” Zuckerberg added at the Facebook Connect virtual reality conference.
During a quarterly earnings call on Monday, Zuckerberg announced that the company will be pouring over $10 billion into its metaverse division. They will report a separate set of financials for Facebook Reality Labs, which will oversee the company’s virtual and augmented reality efforts.
“This is not an investment that is going to be profitable for us anytime in the near future,” he said, adding that the company expects to see the $10 billion investment grow even larger in the years to come. “[However, the metaverse will be] the holy grail of social experiences.”
The rebranding announcement comes amid a barrage of ongoing criticism against the multi-billion dollar company.
Its most recent controversy surrounds thousands of leaked internal documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen which indicate that Facebook deceived its investors and the public about its handling of misinformation and hate speech on its platforms, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
However, Zuckerberg told The Verge that the current controversy has “nothing to bear on this. Even though I think some people might want to make that connection, I think that’s sort of a ridiculous thing. If anything, I think that this is not the environment that you would want to introduce a new brand in.”
According to a blog post from Zuckerberg, the company also said it will trade under a new stock ticker, “MVRS”, beginning in early December.
The company’s shares are now trading at $321.23, up 2.88%, as of press time.
This is a developing story.
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Morgan ChittumMorgan Chittum is a New York-based reporter covering markets, NFTs, the metaverse and digital assets. Before Blockworks she was a street reporter at New York Daily News, where she wrote about homicide, extremist groups, state politics and other critical topics in New York. She was a Media and Journalism Fellow at the Poynter Institute, where she dabbled in data and investigative journalism. She is published in American Banker, Yahoo News, Chicago Tribune and more.
