Zuckerberg's open letter: Why we changed our name to "Meta"

Today, Facebook officially announced that it would change its name to Meta to show the company's emphasis on and investment in the Metaverse. At the same time, Zuckerberg also wrote an article about why the name was changed to Meta, how the company views the Metaverse, and how to build the Metaverse.

We are at the beginning of the next chapter of the Internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company.

In recent decades, technology has given people the ability to connect and express themselves more naturally. When I started Facebook, we primarily typed text on the site. When we got phones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share experiences. We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end.

The next platform will be even more immersive — a physical internet that you can experience, not just look at. We call it the Metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.

The defining quality of the Metaverse will be a sense of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Being truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That’s why we’re focused on building it.

In the Metaverse, you can do nearly anything you can imagine — gather with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — and have entirely new experiences that don’t match the way we think of computers or phones today.

In this future, you’ll be able to teleport to your office in a holographic form, eliminating the need for a commute, attend a concert with friends, or catch up in your parents’ living room. This will open up more opportunities no matter where you live. You’ll be able to spend more time on the things that are important to you, spend less time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.

Think about how many physical things you have today that could be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfectly good work setup with multiple monitors, your board games, etc. — they are not physical objects assembled in a factory, but holograms designed by creators around the world.

You’ll be experiencing these experiences across different devices — AR glasses to stay in the real world, VR for full immersion, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms. This isn’t about spending more time in front of screens; it’s about making the time we already spend better.

Our roles and responsibilities

The Metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers, creating new experiences and digital projects that interoperate and unlock a larger creative economy than is limited by today’s platforms and their policies.

Our role in this journey is to accelerate the development of the foundational technologies, social platforms, and creative tools that bring the Metaverse to life, and to weave these technologies through our social media applications. We believe the Metaverse can deliver a better social experience than anything that exists today, and we are committed to helping realize its potential.

As I wrote in our original founders letter: “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

That approach has served us well. We've built our business to support very large, long-term investments in building better services, and that's what we plan to do here.

The past five years have been humbling for me and our company in many ways. One of the main lessons I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to just build a product that people love.

I increasingly appreciate that the story of the Internet is not a simple one. Each chapter brings new voices and new ideas, but also new challenges, risks, and disruptions to established interests. We need to work together from the beginning to make the best version of this future a reality.

Privacy and security need to be baked into the metaverse from day one. So do open standards and interoperability. This will require not only novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community — but also new forms of governance. Most importantly, we need to help build the ecosystem so that more people have a stake in the future and can benefit from it not only as consumers but also as creators.

This period was also frustrating because, as a large company, we also learned what it was like to build on other platforms. Living under their rules profoundly affected my view of the tech industry. I came to believe that the lack of choice for consumers and high fees for developers were stifling innovation and hindering the internet economy.

We try to take a different approach. We want our services to be available to as many people as possible, and that means working to make costs lower, not higher. Our mobile apps are free. Our advertising model is designed to provide the lowest prices for businesses. Our business tools are available at cost or a modest fee. That's why billions of people enjoy our services and hundreds of millions of businesses rely on our tools.

This is what we want to do to help build the Metaverse. We plan to sell our devices at cost or at a subsidy to make them available to more people. We will continue to support sideloading and streaming from PC so that people have options, rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. Our goal is to provide developer and creator services at a low cost in as many cases as possible so that we can maximize the impact on the overall creative economy. We need to make sure we don't lose too much money in the process, though.

We hope that over the next decade, the Metaverse will reach 1 billion people, carry hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and provide jobs for millions of creators and developers.

Who we are

As we begin this next chapter, I’ve thought a lot about what this means for our company and our identity.

We are a company focused on connecting people. While most technology companies focus on how people interact with technology, we have always focused on building technology so that people can interact with each other.

Today, we are considered a social media company. Facebook is one of the most widely used technology products in the history of the world. It is an iconic social media brand.

Building social applications will always be important to us, and there's a lot more to build. But increasingly, it's not all we do. It's in our DNA that we build technology that brings people together. The Metaverse is the next frontier for connecting people, just like social networks were when we first started.

Right now our brand is so tied to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we do today, let alone in the future. Over time, I want us to be seen as a metaverse company, and I want to position our work and our identity around what we’re building.

We just announced that we are making a fundamental change to our company. We will now view and report on our business as two distinct segments: one for our family of apps, and another for our work on future platforms. Our work on the Metaverse is more than just one of these segments. The Metaverse encompasses both social experiences and future technologies. As we broaden our vision, it’s time for us to adopt a new brand.

To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to announce that our company is now Meta.

Our mission remains the same - it's still about bringing people together. Our app and its brand haven't changed. We're still the same company that designs technology around people.

But all of our products, including our apps, now have a new vision: to help bring the Metaverse to life. And now we have a name that reflects the breadth of what we do.

From now on, we will be Metaverse first, not Facebook first. This means that over time, you will no longer need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new branding starts to appear across our products, I hope people around the world will get to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for.

I studied classics, and the word "meta" comes from the Greek, meaning "beyond." To me, it symbolizes that there is always more to build, and there is always a next chapter to the story. Our story began in a dorm room and has expanded beyond our imaginations; into a series of apps that people use to connect with each other, find their voices, and build businesses, communities, and movements that are changing the world.

I’m proud of everything we’ve done so far, and I’m excited about what’s next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the limits of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, to a world where everyone can be together, create new opportunities, and experience new things. This is a future that transcends any one company, and will be created by all of us, together.

We’ve built something that brings people together in new ways. We’ve learned lessons from battling difficult social issues and living behind closed platforms. Now it’s time to use everything we’ve learned to help build the next chapter.

I've put a lot of energy into this - more than any other company in the world. If this is the future you want to see, I hope you'll join us. The future will be better than we can imagine.