BECAUSE OF COURSE HE DOES

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants workers to be renamed as 'metamates'

Wed, February 16, 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to further push the company formerly known as Facebook into the metaverse.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Well, let's stay on unusual, Julie, because Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder, wants his employees to be known as Meta Mates. I guess that makes us, Julie, Yahoo's. But again, Meta Mates just really corporate jargon. That really means absolutely nothing. You mean to tell me if you're in Facebook's headquarters if you happen to be there at all, you're going to go up to a water cooler or the coffee cooler and say, hey, what's up, Meta Mate? Probably not. I think it just shows the clear disconnect between the management team over at Meta and probably a lot of employees inside the company right now.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, apparently, this stems from something that they use over at Instagram, which comes from a Naval phrase, which is ship, shipmates, self. Like, that's--

BRIAN SOZZI: Sure, OK.

JULIE HYMAN: --how you think about it, OK?

BRIAN SOZZI: Yeah.

JULIE HYMAN: But I don't know that that extends to Meta, Meta Mates, me, which is what Zuckerberg talked about. I mean, it's just-- in addition to everything else, I think that the culture of Facebook is relevant because what we so frequently get from the company seems so disconnected from the outside world, in some ways, whether it's the development of the Metaverse itself, whether it's some of their reactions to some of the critiques leveled at the company. And this is just sort of a piece with that, maybe at times, tone deafness or insular nature of the company.

BRIAN SOZZI: If I walked-- if I worked at Facebook or Meta, Julie, and I went up to my colleague and said, hey, what's up, Meta Mate? Good morning. I would expect to be just ostracized from the group and not being talked to. Come on, come on. What, Tesla now is going to rename its employees Musk Mates? Get real here. Ridiculous.

JULIE HYMAN: OK, Yahoo, we'll talk about this later.

BRIAN SOZZI: Yahoo!