Zuck has won the social media game. With multiple billions of monthly active users, it's pretty much impossible to continue growing at a rapid rate. Â
Meta has dominated web2, which are websites that emphasise user-generated content but their inevitable stagnation and decline due to their success has forced them to pivot in order to survive and continue growing.
For the first time since it's founding in 2004, Facebook experienced a decline in its monthly active users earlier this year.
It doesn't help that Apple's App Tracking Transparency Privacy feature stops Facebook from tracking people through iPhone identifiers. This feature cost Facebook $10 Billion which is a pretty significant hit to its business.
So the Meta ship is heading towards an iceberg and the captain of the ship needs to make a detour to save the Trillion Dollar Behemoth that is Meta.
The bet that Meta is making is that the Metaverse will be it's saviour so they are literally betting it all on this one move.
So far it doesn't look good and the best representation of that is the stock price. Investors might uhh be a little concerned about the future of Meta.
This is wild. I was listening to the All In Podcast and they talked about how the bet that Meta is a historic bet that is unparalleled in modern times. They said that the only other bet of this caliber was the Apollo Program in the 1960s.
Chamath said they came to the $250B figure by extrapolating $25b per year of spending over the next decade which is a bit weird since you have to assume that Meta hasn't gone bankrupt and continues to survive for the next decade with it's other pillars that have stagnated or even started to decline due to competitors or negative brand image.
Now Meta wants to dominate the next version of the web which they believe to be the Metaverse which consists of AR and VR.
This is mainly through their VR headsets which are under their Reality Labs division which was formerly called Oculus and was founded by Palmer Lucky.
These VR headsets are the hardware that power the software that is the metaverse so it makes sense why Zuckerberg really wants to dominate the space by creating the headset so that he can finally have control of the hardware that powers his software.
After all if you don't control the hardware, how will you sell ads that covers 80% of a person's peripheral vision.
So that's why Meta is going all in on the Metaverse and built the following products and has spent $36B since 2019 and has had operating losses of $30.7B since 2019.
Oculus Rift
Oculus Go
Oculus Quest
Oculus Rift S
Oculus Quest 2
Meta Quest Pro
