‘Facebookers’ to ‘Metamates.’ Mark Zuckerberg’s New Values Haven’t Budged the Stock.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the first update to his company’s core values since 2007.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
It is the company name and will now form part of the employee moniker.
Workers at Meta Platforms (ticker: FB), the social media giant that runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, will be called Metamates, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday.
The group previously known as Facebook changed its name to Meta last October to reflect its increasing focus on the metaverse, which describes emerging platforms and technologies that serve a future vision of virtual worlds.
Co-workers that were once “Facebookers” are now “Metamates,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post, citing a memo circulated to employees that outlined six new core values. It’s the first update to the company’s values since 2007, the CEO said.
“At the end of last year, we put a flag in the ground with Meta as our new name and vision for the future,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re now a metaverse company, building the future of social connection.”
The six new values Zuckerberg described were: move fast; focus on long-term impact; build awesome things; live in the future; be direct and respect your colleagues; and “meta, metamates, me,” which describes employees’ sense of responsibility.
The sentiment had no effect on Meta stock, which was 0.5% lower in U.S. premarket trading Wednesday.
The group’s shares have taken a beating recently, with Meta notching the largest one-day loss of market capitalization in U.S. history earlier this month, dropping 26% and wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars in value.
To blame was the company’s weak fourth-quarter earnings, which included dismal outlook and details about a number of existential threats to the company. In short: It looks like users are fleeing Meta’s platforms, and its core advertising business faces significant headwinds from changes to privacy rules for users of Apple (AAPL) devices.
Meta’s market value has collapsed, and while some investors have talked about buying the dip, there have yet to be any signs of a real rebound as the debate continues over whether the stock is truly attractively priced.
Macro conditions—namely, higher interest rates ahead—have added further weight to tech stocks in particular since the start of the year, making the road ahead bumpy.
Write to Jack Denton at [email protected]
