Zuckerberg pulls the plug on Metaverse:
Meta is killing the metaverse, the concept it is named after. It's pulling down Horizon Worlds from the Quest store, with a shutdown date of June 15, and issued a statement describing the move as giving each platform "greater focus". That last part is corporate for: we flushed $80B down the drain and we're not sorry about it.
Breaking down the buzz:
Horizon Worlds launched in late 2021, the same year Zuck renamed the company, telling the world that virtual reality was the next internet. The pitch was ambitious enough to be memorable: a billion users, hundreds of billions in digital commerce, jobs for millions of creators. None of it happened, not even a bit. The platform peaked at a few hundred thousand monthly users. Reports described empty rooms, weak retention, avatars without legs. The mobile version, launched in 2023 to reach people who did not own a headset, did not change the trajectory either. In January this year, Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit that built all of this. Reality Labs posted a $6.02B operating loss in just the fourth quarter of last year. Total metaverse spending across the life of the bet is around $80B.
Its advertising business, boosted by AI, has been growing through all of it. The Ray-Ban smart glasses are doing well. The on-platform AI assistant has users as well. Meta is not in crisis.
Why this matters:
What is worth noting is the broader lesson about how technology actually gets adopted. The metaverse was not a fringe idea dreamed up in a garage. It attracted serious capital, serious engineers and serious regulatory attention. It failed because people did not find it useful. Not confusing, not expensive, just not worth the friction of putting on a headset to do things they could already do on a phone. Utility beats vision, every time.
The more interesting question is what this says about Zuck as a capital allocator. Most executives who spend $80B on something spend the next several years defending it. The "sunk cost fallacy" is hard to escape; the bigger the bet, the harder it is to walk away without looking like you made a mistake. Zuck appears to be wired differently. He announced the pivot, watched it fail in public for four years, and is now committing a larger amount of capital to AI without visible hesitation. What it means is that Meta is unlikely to defend bad bets past their useful life. If the AI investments stop producing, expect the pivot announcement before the losses become a serious concern.
Copy my portfolio for steady and consistent growth, $META (Meta Platforms Inc)... Show More
Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.
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Thu Jun 18 2026 17:09:47 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
