Meta Platforms adopted its corporate name in 2021 while retaining Facebook as one of its major products.
Facebook announced the name change to Meta Platforms in October 2021. The rebranding reflected the company’s stated interest in building the metaverse, a collection of immersive and interconnected digital environments. The company’s family of products still includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
The change created two names that are often confused. Meta Platforms is the public corporation and its stock-market identity, while Facebook is a social-networking service owned by that corporation. Meta also uses Reality Labs for its virtual- and augmented-reality work, including Quest headsets.
Meta’s market capitalization is influenced primarily by advertising across its social platforms, as well as expectations for artificial intelligence, messaging, and virtual reality. A corporate renaming does not itself change the shares’ economic ownership or automatically increase the company’s market value.