I don't know if I've laughed more at a headline this year than when I sat down with a coffee this morning and saw "Meta Plans to Shift Spending Away From the Metaverse".
It's from a Wall Street Journal story, which reports that Meta is going to make some big budget changes in 2026, slashing spending on its metaverse efforts and redirecting that cash towards the company's AI and AI-powered wearable divisions instead.
In 2021, just four years ago, Zuckerberg was so into the idea of the metaverse that he changed his company's name from Facebook, one of the most recognisable brands on the planet, to Meta. He said within the next decade--so by 2031--one billion people would be hanging out in these virtual spaces, which were a key selling point for Quest headsets.
ABC News
And investors and shareholders believed him! He said something that had no basis in reality, which was never going to happen and--surprise--has not happened, and sunk billions of dollars into a quixotic quest. Now he's stuck with a company named after something he's making a humiliating retreat from.
In 2022, he was so into the idea of NFTs that he spoke openly about a vision that one day soon users of his metaverse would be able to buy clothing items as NFTs, and announced plans to bring them to both Facebook and Instagram. This received widespread news coverage! Because he was CEO of Meta, he must know about this tech stuff!
Just one year later, those plans were cancelled as the ass fell out of the NFT market, with regular human people proving they did not want or care about that bullshit.
Earlier this year he said Meta was looking into crypto. Sigh.
And now we're supposed to believe that AI and its associated wearables, who you may remember from their disastrous press event, are the future? That somehow AI is going to be writing all the code for Meta within months? To the point where he's planning on spending $600 billion on it over the next three years? My guy, everything you've said was the future over the last decade (remember the phone!) has turned out to be a useless piece of shit! Nobody in their right mind should believe you!
And yet! This man, whose only true success is in building a pervy website in the early 2000s then tricking the world into thinking it was a viable social media platform, is repeatedly allowed to say whatever bullshit comes to mind into a microphone and millions of people will not just lap it up, they will give him billions of dollars to keep doing it, then give him billions more when whatever he's working on is a bust and he decides to do something else.
Example: Meta shares were up 4% today. Investors looked at a man who had spent billions chasing something nobody wanted and, instead of punishing his repeated hubris and failures, simply made the line go up again. It’s the definition of insanity.
I'm wrong all the time, why won't anyone give me billions to invest in something. At least I'd build something cool.
