Zuckerberg’s empire collapses

Mark Zuckerberg is in a lot of trouble. He has turned away from the slog of running Facebook to focus almost entirely on his ‘metaverse’, a vision of the internet where people enter interactive virtual spaces using virtual reality (VR) headsets. He has pledged investment of at least $10 billion a year for a decade, and investors have been told that profits will be lower for the next decade as a result. He saw the digital future once. Can he repeat the trick?

Right now, it seems not. His company’s stock price has more than halved, wiping $600 billion off its market value. Shareholders are worried. Meta is to cut expenses by at least 10 per cent in the coming months, in part through redundancies. More cuts are expected.

Last week’s Meta conference – held in the metaverse, aptly enough – failed to change the mood. The announcements of a $1,499 VR headset and the dramatic introduction of legs for metaverse avatars did little to convince the markets this really is the future: Meta’s share price is down almost 25 per cent just in the past month.