After a decade of buying and selling as Facebook, the social media big is shedding the final vestige of its previous company avatar because it begins buying and selling beneath the ticker image META on Thursday.

Meta Platforms rebranded from its eponymous social networking platform in October 2021, betting that the metaverse, a shared digital realm, will succeed cell Internet.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s co-founder and CEO, established Facebook in 2004 from his Harvard dorm as a method for college students to satisfy through the Internet.

Little did the then 19-year-old pupil know that Facebook would change into integral to many individuals’s social life, with almost three billion month-to-month customers, and develop to incorporate standard social media apps Instagram and Whatsapp in its universe.

Nearly twenty years on, his firm is pouring billions of {dollars} into the metaverse, a futuristic concept of digital environments the place customers can work, socialize and play, by including new options to {hardware} gadgets that function entry factors.

“Companies that change their official name and ticker are usually trying to signal that there has been a fundamental change in the underlying business model,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at National Securities in New York, mentioned.

“I’m not sure if it really makes much of a big difference. I still call them Google and Facebook,” Hogan added.

Meta shares have fallen almost 42 % this yr because it battles criticism from lawmakers and regulators over its market energy, algorithmic choices and its policing of abuses.

© Thomson Reuters 2022