Bulletins

Facebook renames itself to Meta

The new company will oversee both Facebook's legacy apps as well as its metaverse efforts.

Facebook renames itself to Meta
Image: Meta

The cat is out of the bag: Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Meta as Facebook's new corporate name at the company's Connect developer conference Thursday morning.

"We have a new north star: to bring the metaverse to life," Zuckerberg said. "From now on, we're going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first."

Zuckerberg also published a new founder's letter to further explain the name change. "Right now our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything we're doing today, let alone in the future," the letter reads in part. "Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we're building towards."

Meta is being positioned as the new corporate entity overseeing both the company's existing apps and services business, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, as well as its AR, VR and metaverse efforts. To further formalize this change, the company is going to change its stock ticker from FB to MVRS in December.

Earlier this week, the company told investors that it was going to break out those two lines of business separately in earnings starting this quarter. At the time, the company also revealed that it was going to spend more than $10 billion on AR, VR and metaverse tech this year alone.

This is a developing story.

Janko Roettgers

Janko Roettgers (Twitter, Mastodon) used to be a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.

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