Actually, Mark Zuckerberg didn't burn $80 billion on the metaverse

• It's easy to dunk on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta for burning $80 billion on the metaverse and then moving on.
• But that's not exactly true.
• What is true is that Zuckerberg used to spend a lot of time talking about the metaverse. Now he talks about AI instead.

Nearly five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg told us the future was the metaverse — an idea that seemed to involve all of us strapping on virtual reality goggles and interacting with digital versions of ourselves.

Now, reports say Zuckerberg's Meta is bailing on the metaverse after losing more than $80 billion on the project.

This is a fun story for people who like stories about Big Tech tripping on itself.

But it's not really true.

Start with the $80 billion that publications like The New York Times and others say Zuckerberg has lost chasing the metaverse. Meta has indeed generated losses of at least $80 billion via its Reality Labs unit, which lost more than $19 billion in 2025 alone.

But Reality Labs is not going away. That's because Reality Labs makes lots of things beyond Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality space Zuckerberg told us that we would work and play in, but that almost no one actually visited.

Reality Labs also develops all the hardware Meta has been selling over the years, including its Quest virtual reality goggles, and its Ray-Ban AI glasses, which seem to have at least some consumer uptake (whether that's good for the world is a different issue).

At some point in the next couple years, Meta will roll out yet another set of glasses, purportedly designed to let you stream movies at home. (These are the same glasses Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said director James Cameron can't stop talking about.)

It's entirely possible that all of Meta's device efforts will amount to very little. Efforts to get anyone but gamers to buy virtual reality headsets really haven't panned out, and while Meta, Apple, and others are now racing to bring the same tech to lightweight glasses, we have no idea if these things will ever be more than a novelty.

But for now, Meta is still plugging away at this stuff. Which means Reality Labs will continue to generate billions of dollars in losses this year and beyond.

OK. What about the idea that Meta is no longer interested in the metaverse — a notion Zuckerberg said was so important that he re-named his company after it?

That's a little trickier to assess. Meta is quite prickly about the notion that it's bailing on the metaverse: Its argument is that the metaverse doesn't have to involve headsets, and that you could do all kinds of metaverse-y things on your phone — or maybe your phone paired with some new glasses.

That's what Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth is getting at with this tweet he put out this week (and which Meta comms directed me to when I asked them for comment for this story):

Could be! But it's also true that Zuckerberg's public interest in the metaverse seems to have dramatically tapered off since 2021, when he told us the future was all about living in virtual space. (Zuckerberg had very different hair back then, too.)

Now, of course, Zuckerberg spends most of his time talking about AI, and Meta's ambitions to build "superintelligence." Which is why he's spending gazillions on AI talent and datacenters.

It's possible that all of those efforts get replaced by something else, too. Everyone in tech swears that the current AI boom really is a world-reshaping moment, and maybe it will be. But if you're still wondering what happened to all those NFTs you bought in 2021, I'll forgive you if you're going to remain in a wait-and-see on this one.

There is another way to think about Meta's interest in both the metaverse and AI. They're both shiny new things that offer Zuckerberg the promise of something he's wanted for a very long time: a way to run a business without having to rely on Google or Apple as his intermediaries.

Right now, Meta reaches people through phones and operating systems it doesn't control. At peak metaverse hype, Zuckerberg was clearly hoping to replace the iPhone with devices of his own. And in an AI-first world, it's possible the phone matters a lot less — or gets displaced by a new set of devices and interfaces.

That doesn't mean AI is just the metaverse with a new label. But it does suggest the through line here isn't the technology. It's Zuckerberg's recurring search for a platform he owns.