Keep pulling the thread on Reality Labs.
Meta's Reality Labs division has incurred losses of $70 billion since 2020 and continues to lose billions each quarter on its metaverse venture.
John Carmack, who helped lead Meta's metaverse efforts, left the company in 2022 because he believed its execution on VR was wrong, despite being bullish on the long-term potential of the technology.
Meta's stock price fell 70% between the start of 2022 and October 2022.
Between November 2022 and May 2023, Meta laid off 20,000 employees, which constituted approximately 25% of its total workforce.
In Q3 2025, Meta's Reality Labs division generated $470 million in sales while losing $4.4 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg has shifted Meta's strategic focus away from the metaverse and towards artificial intelligence.
According to some estimates, the number of daily active users in Meta's Horizon Worlds platform could be as low as 900.
Meta's initial metaverse product strategy included Horizon Worlds, the Meta Horizon OS, a companion mobile app, the Meta Horizon Store for apps, and a personalized social space called Horizon Home.
In 2023, John Carmack publicly criticized Meta's virtual reality products as being too glitchy and slow.
Meta employees working on the metaverse project lacked a clear, unified definition of what they were building.
Internal use of Meta's VR meeting platform was plagued by glitches and friction, with employees sometimes spending 30 minutes just to join a meeting.
By February 2023, Meta's Horizon Worlds had approximately 20,000 monthly active users and an estimated 8,000 daily active users.