Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s digital Metaverse is set to lose “significant” amounts of money for the next three to five years according to statements at a recent shareholder meeting. The announcement comes as Facebook (now known as Meta) faces significant headwinds, including a recently announced hiring freeze across multiple divisions.
Bloomberg reports that during a recent shareholder meeting, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he plans to heavily invest in the company’s Metaverse, which will mean losing “significant” amounts of money on the project over the next three to five years.
Zuckerberg stated that the metaverse will eventually be profitable, making money from a creator economy as people build businesses selling virtual goods and services in an immersive digital world. “We want to get the hardware to be as affordable as possible for everyone, and make sure the digital economy grows,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg added that in the meantime, the company is betting on revenue growth from its investment in its Reels short-form video service which is attempting to compete with apps like TikTok.
Breitbart News recently reported that Facebook is reducing its investments in a number of its products. The company is also enacting a massive hiring freeze and reducing hiring targets in a strategy that will impact “almost every team across the company.” This appears to be an extension of its earlier warning to the hardware division to “expect cutbacks.”
Due to “slower revenue growth than anticipated,” Facebook is implementing a company-wide hiring freeze and doesn’t intend to meet hiring goals set at the start of the year. According to the memo, the company’s problems are due to the Apple privacy changes, the war in Ukraine, and the “general macroeconomic environment.”
The company is reportedly no longer hiring for certain engineering roles and is implementing a pause on the hiring of recruiters and low-level data scientists. Many employees have begun to fear that layoffs are coming soon, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal all-hands meeting last week that job cuts are not being planned.
“I can’t sit here and make a permanent ongoing promise that as things shift that we won’t have to reconsider that,” Zuckerberg said. “But what I can tell you is that as of where we sit today, our expectation is not that we’re going to have to do that. And instead, basically what we’re doing is we’re dialing growth to the levels that we think are going to be manageable over time.”
Read more at Bloomberg here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com