Zuckerberg’s Meta Fires 11,000 Employees to Have More Money for Metaverse

Previously: Mark Zuckerberg’s VR Metaverse Project Failing Spectacularly, Bringing Entire Company Down

There is so much money going into Metaverse now, it must be way better than Second Life (which it ripped off).

Second Life was really good, but if you’re spending billions, you must be able to make a better game.

As soon as life gets much, much worse, people will be ready to put on these nausea-inducing headsets and slide deep into the very boring Metaverse.

Reuters:

Meta Platforms Inc said on Wednesday it would cut more than 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce, in one of the year’s biggest layoffs as the Facebook parent battles soaring costs from its push into the metaverse amid a weak advertising market.

The mass layoffs, the first in Meta’s 18-year history, follow thousands of job cuts at other major tech companies including Elon Musk-owned Twitter and Microsoft Corp.

The pandemic-led boom that boosted tech companies and their valuations has turned into a bust this year in the face of decades-high inflation and rapidly rising interest rates.

“Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a message to employees.

“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

The company also plans to cut discretionary spending and extend its hiring freeze through the first quarter. But it did not specify the impacted regions or the expected cost savings from the moves.

It now expects 2023 expenses of as much as $100 billion, compared with up to $100 billion previously, with more of the resources being focused on areas such as artificial intelligence, ads, business platforms and the metaverse.

Wall Street has been losing patience over Zuckerberg’s enormous and experimental bets on his metaverse project, a shared virtual world, with one shareholder recently calling the investments “super-sized and terrifying”.

Concerns over the spending spree have wiped off more than two-thirds of Meta’s market value so far this year. But its shares rose 4.5% to $100.80 before the bell on Wednesday.

“The market is breathing a sigh of relief that Meta’s management or Zuckerberg specifically seems to be heeding some advice, which is you need to take some of the steam out of the growing expenditure bill,” Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said.

She, however, added that “it does not quite tally that you’re going to try and increase efficiency at the same time as chasing something as ambitious and as tenuous as the metaverse”.

It’s not only ambitious, it’s a bad game.

No one likes this VR stuff. It’s just a novelty.

I guess you can say that it’s intended to be a virtual world for when the brain implants come out. That might make sense. But there is no reason to believe these brain implants aren’t going to cause serious mental illness and be proven totally nonviable as anything other than an aid for cripples (you should be able to hook up artificial limbs, I think – but the idea of totally connecting the brain to a computer is just obviously going to cause psychosis).

What I don’t understand is why it costs so much money. The Metaverse is literally Second Life. The graphics are not impressive. Why does it cost billions of dollars?