Meta's Stock Price Has Plummeted As Zuckerberg Goes In On Metaverse

thegamer.com:

The co-founder of Facebook is seriously passionate about the metaverse. The company even rebranded from Facebook to Meta to indicate this shift, although it was curiously timed when there was wider media coverage of Facebook's alleged failings to protect children's mental health and allegations that its algorithims had led to greater divisiveness and discord.

Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world late last year that he was planning to move his company towards the metaverse and that this would mean higher spending. But recently, Meta's stock price has fallen dramatically and the tech founder has become a little less vocal about these plans.

Related: The Dystopian Origins And Future Of the Metaverse, Explained

Zuckerberg has committed billions every year to building technology, in software and hardware, that can bring to fruition the metaverse, a concept that he is banking on for the future. But it's proving very costly. As The Verge reported, during the company's earnings call for the first quarter, Zuckerberg announced that Meta is to "slow the pace of some of our investments" because of "current business growth levels".

Investors have been alarmed. Meta's stock price has dropped almost 50 percent, meaning the past five years of growth has been wiped out, since it rebranded from its original name last October. At the same time that it announced that it was changing its name from Facebook, Zuckerberg revealed he was spending $10 billion a year on a new division dedicated to building out the metaverse, a department known as Reality Labs.

Reality Labs is responsible for the Quest VR headset and the development of AR glasses. It's a richly endowed division, since it's known that it lost nearly $3 billion just in the