Facebook to Rebrand Company as Meta in Focus on Metaverse

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company would change its name to Meta to reflect growth opportunities beyond its namesake social-media platform in online digital realms known as the metaverse. “Over time I hope our company will be seen as a metaverse company,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve gone from desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video, but this isn’t the end of the line. The next platform and medium will be even more immersive—an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it, and we call this the metaverse.” Facebook is already investing heavily in creating that new reality of shared online spaces inhabited by digital avatars, with projects ranging from virtual-reality glasses to an e-commerce platform. The company is adapting its structure as well; Facebook Reality Labs, which encompasses augmented-reality and virtual-reality products and services, is becoming a separate reporting unit and spending for it would reduce 2021’s total operating profit by $10 billion. “We expect to spend many billions of dollars for years to come,” said the CEO. Zuckerberg has said it would take time before the metaverse becomes lucrative for his company, saying, “Building the foundational platforms for the metaverse will be a long road. Later in this decade is when we would sort of expect this to be more of a real business story.”