Mark Zuckerberg looked at the metaverse, saw the future, and apparently forgot to check whether anyone else had RSVP'd.
Meta's Reality Labs division has now burned through tens of billions of dollars building virtual worlds where you can attend a meeting as a legless cartoon avatar.
Investors are thrilled, assuming "thrilled" now means "mildly nauseous." The pitch was simple: strap a heavy headset to your face, spend $1,500, and hang out in a digital room with worse graphics than a 2009 Wii game.
Meanwhile, your actual friends are three feet away, texting you from the couch.
But sure, let's do a virtual happy hour where everyone's hands clip through the table.
Here's the part that gets me: Meta rebranded the entire company around this.
Changed the name, the logo, the stock ticker.
It's like if Apple renamed itself "iToaster" before shipping a single toaster.
Wall Street responded by slowly backing out of the room while maintaining eye contact.
The headset itself is a marvel of engineering that nobody wants to wear for more than 45 minutes.
It's heavy, it's sweaty, and it makes you look like a cyborg who lost a fight with a windshield.
Apple's Vision Pro has the same problem but at least it looks expensive enough to impress your coworkers.
Meanwhile, the actual metaverse—the one people use—is just Zoom and Discord and a group chat where your aunt posts Minion memes.
Nobody needs a digital avatar with floating torso syndrome to feel connected.
The funniest part is watching Meta pivot.
One day it's "the metaverse is the future." Next day it's "AI is our top priority." It's like a guy who spent all his savings on a boat, then discovered he gets seasick, and now he's really into gardening.
To be fair, the tech might eventually be cool.
Virtual reality could be huge for gaming, training, maybe even therapy.
But Zuckerberg didn't bet on a niche product.
He bet the whole company on the idea that you'd rather be a cartoon in a glitchy office than a real person in a real one.
That's a hostage situation with extra steps.
Reality Labs loses billions every quarter.
Users try it, shrug, and go back to TikTok.
The headsets collect dust next to the Peloton and the bread maker.
It's the graveyard of things we bought because a billionaire told us we needed them.
So here we are, years and billions later, watching Meta pretend this was all part of the plan.
It was a midlife crisis with a shareholder presentation. **The Take**: Betting ten billion dollars on a product your customers actively avoid is a bold strategy.
Meta didn't build the future—it built a very expensive place to be alone together.
Final Thoughts
The only thing virtual about this empire is the profits.