Meta has burned $15 billion trying to build the metaverse — and nobody's saying exactly where the money wentMeta has spent more than $15 billion on its Reality Labs metaverse venture since the beginning of last year, but so far, the company hasn't shared on what, precisely, money is being spent.
Some experts are getting worried the company is spending good money after bad.
"The problem is that they spend the money, but the transparency with investors has been a disaster," Dan Ives, a tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, said.
"This continues to be a risky bet by Zuckerberg and the team because, for now, they're betting money on the future while they continue to have massive headwinds on their core business," he added.
I always thought that Metaverse is a stupid idea, it can only succeed when VR is massively popular, which it is not right now. Zuck is trying to put a cart before the horse.
You've got to wonder where such a big sum of money really ends up and how the breakdown actually looks. Whether it is mostly spent on arranging server contracts, hiring super computers to do some sort of modelling, building up data centers, or how much staffing is allocated to this project. It makes a super convenient way to offset taxes by reallocating budgets or hiding certain costs within this research & development which might actually benefit other companies within the Meta group. The more they spend on this project, the more they can write off profits in places like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp - I hope the regulators are paying close attention to the accounts.