Bloomberg: Mark Zuckerberg’s Sales Job on Facebook’s Metaverse Is Falling Flat

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently appeared on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast where he attempted to tout the benefits of his Metaverse obsession, but many remain unconvinced.

Bloomberg reports that Facebook (now known as Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast this month where he discussed his company’s plans for the future of online interaction with the digital metaverse. Zuckerberg attempted to convince Rogan of the benefits of socializing via a VR headset in a digital world, even giving Rogan an early version of Facebook’s new Project Cambria VR headset.

During the three-hour interview, Zuckerberg attempted to impress Rogan referring to himself as a three-sport varsity athlete and proclaiming his newfound love of the martial art jujitsu, even hiring one of Rogan’s friends as a coach. Throughout the interview, Zuckerberg argued that VR and AR would revolutionize how people work, socialize, and exercise and would displace other forms of entertainment like television.

Zuckerberg gave an example of how he believes the Metaverse would work in a modern setting, describing smart glasses — not unlike the Ray-Ban frames Facebook already sells — that would be operated via brain waves. “You’ll be able to have this experience in the future, where you’re sitting in a meeting, and your wife texts you, and it pops up in the corner of your glasses,” Zuckerberg said. “You want to respond, but you don’t want to pull out your phone because that’s kind of rude.”

Zuckerberg said that users would be able to send messages using a “virtual hand” controlled by their mind to send text messages. “No one even knows you’re doing it, and you just, like, send a message,” Zuckerberg said. However, despite Zuckerberg’s dedication to the idea, the Metaverse is currently costing Facebook more money than it makes.

Bloomberg reports:

If Zuckerberg’s latest marketing efforts seem amusing and self-defeating, they also show just how badly the company has flubbed its pivot into the metaverse. It began more than eight years ago with the purchase of Oculus VR for $2 billion and has expanded pretty much each year since then with little to show for it. Meta has built an unbelievably efficient business selling online ads that appear in its social media properties, which brought in $116 billion in revenue and $57 billion in profit in 2021. Reality Labs, the company’s name for its VR and AR business, generated revenue of only $2 billion, a tiny figure by comparison that looks even worse when you consider how much money Meta spent to generate it.

Meta reported a $10 billion loss on Reality Labs in 2021, not including the billions Facebook spent buying Oculus and developing, manufacturing, and marketing successive VR headsets between 2014 and 2020. Last year’s epic losses have only widened this year, up 15% in the most recent quarter from the same period in 2021.

Zuckerberg has presented these losses as investments, as if Meta were directing all of that money into fundamental research and as if these ideas are brand-new to consumers. But Facebook has spent most of its history as a publicly traded company aggressively marketing VR headsets, both on its own enormous platform and elsewhere. I first heard Zuckerberg’s VR pitch in 2015, a year after the Oculus acquisition. Listening to the Rogan podcast, it was striking how little had changed since then. Back in the mid-2010s, Zuckerberg and his deputies were talking up the way the company’s VR product, then known as the Rift, gave users a sense of physical presence, which they said would be game-changing for remote work, among other uses. They acknowledged that VR would be a big deal for games. But the video game business, they said, was just the beginning.

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