Facebook renamed itself Meta to anchor its identity on an unbuilt metaverse

Facebook - now Meta - is a social media company earning nearly all revenue from advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

The next computing platform is a metaverse, and anchoring identity and reporting on it beats carrying a damaged social-media name.

Zuckerberg had become the corporate world's loudest metaverse voice; Facebook had already pledged to hire 10,000 people in the EU to build it before renaming the parent company Meta, from the Greek for 'beyond'.

Announced October 28, 2021: apps kept their names, the parent became Meta with a blue-infinity logo replacing the thumbs-up, reporting split into family of apps and future platforms, and shares would trade as MVRS from December 1. Critics read it as distraction from the Haugen documents; one senator called the move 'cosmetic'; the Alphabet precedent suggested few people would actually use the new name.

The rename landed mid-scandal: Haugen had accused the company of putting 'profits over safety' across multiple products.

Zuckerberg argued the Facebook name could not represent the company's future work, and he wanted identity anchored on what he was building toward.

The metaverse did not yet exist, so the new name described a product bet rather than the business funding it.

Corporate rebrands had a poor track record - Google's 2015 Alphabet restructure never changed what people called the company.

A rebrand can change what a company reports against, but it cannot rename a controversy or conjure the product the new name promises.

Meta began trading as MVRS on December 1, 2021, and started reporting in two segments. Whether employees, users and investors would adopt the name - and whether the metaverse bet would justify it - was an open question as of the announcement.