Nearly five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg said the future was the Metaverse. The idea seemed to imply that we would all be wearing virtual reality goggles and interacting with digital versions of ourselves.
Now, Zuckerberg’s Meta is reportedly bailing out Metaverse after losing more than $80 billion on the project.
This is a fun story for anyone who likes stories about Big Tech tripping itself up.
But that’s not true.
Let’s start with the $80 billion that publications like the New York Times lost chasing Zuckerberg into the Metaverse. In fact, Meta has generated at least $80 billion in losses through its Reality Labs division, with more than $19 billion in losses in 2025 alone.
But Reality Labs isn’t going away. That’s because Reality Labs makes a lot more than Horizon Worlds. Horizon Worlds is the virtual reality space that Zuckerberg told us we would work and play in, but almost no one actually visited.
Reality Labs also makes all the hardware that Meta has sold over the years, including the Quest virtual reality goggles and Ray-Ban AI glasses, which seem to have at least some consumer acceptance (whether that’s good for the world is another question).
At some point in the next few years, Meta plans to launch another pair of glasses designed to help you stream movies at home. (These are the same glasses that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said he can’t stop talking about about director James Cameron.)
There’s a good chance that all Meta devices require very little effort. Efforts to get non-gamers to buy virtual reality headsets haven’t really worked, and while companies like Meta and Apple are now racing to bring the same technology to lightweight glasses, it’s unclear whether these will become more than just a novelty.
But for now, Meta is still working on this. This means Reality Labs will continue to lose billions of dollars this year and beyond.
got it. What about the idea that Meta is no longer interested in the Metaverse? Zuckerberg says the concept is so important that he renamed his company after the Metaverse.
It’s a little difficult to evaluate that. Meta is very troubling about the concept of tapping into the Metaverse. The Metaverse’s argument is that the Metaverse is not. have Headsets allow you to do all sorts of metaverse-y things with your phone. Or you can pair your phone with new glasses.
That’s what Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth meant in this tweet he posted this week (and what Meta told me to do when I asked for comment on this article).
Maybe so! But it’s also true that public interest in the Metaverse appears to have waned dramatically since 2021, when Zuckerberg said the future would be all about living in virtual spaces. (Zuckerberg also had a very different hairstyle back then.)
Now, unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg spends most of his time talking about AI and meta ambitions to build “superintelligence.” That’s why he’s spending billions of dollars on AI talent and data centers.
All those efforts may be replaced by something else. Everyone in the tech industry is adamant that the current AI boom is truly a world-reshaping moment, and perhaps it will be. But if you’re still wondering what happened to all the NFTs you bought in 2021, I’ll forgive you if you’re going to continue to wait and see on this one.
There is another way to think about Meta’s interest in both the Metaverse and AI. Both are shiny new Mr. Zuckerberg offered what he had long wanted: the promise of a way to run a business without relying on Google or Apple as intermediaries.
Currently, Meta is reaching people through phones and operating systems that Meta does not control. When Metaverse hype was at its peak, Zuckerberg clearly wanted to replace the iPhone with his own device. And in an AI-first world, phones may become significantly less important or replaced by a new set of devices and interfaces.
That doesn’t mean AI is just a metaverse with a new label. But the throughline here suggests that technology is not. That’s something Zuckerberg has repeatedly sought out on the platforms he owns.