Quite surprised to see more comments are negative about the technology, but myself I beleive it is really possible but not going to happen in very short time like in 18 months, it will take atleast 5 years to roll out the beta and the development will go on for years. Why Mark started too early is to establish he wants to take the first seat so more profits than back seats but as far as the investors concern towards is understandable but they took the bet so have to accept the outcome as well.
But he is burning billions without a product in sight! Metaverse as we can see it in some promo videos is still far away, and 18 months or 5 years is a pretty long time... he will probably burn even more billions until that point! I don't think that people are negative, it's just reality. For metaverse you will need VR, and how many people have and actively use it?! And do we really need it? How many people are really interested in the metaverse? Do we really need some other reality like the one we can see in some movies?
I guess the metaverse can be interesting, but let's keep it within some limits! We also need to stay humans who need some real touch!
I am guessing that it's not directly cash, most of the time when calculating these type of things they do count things that are not directly money, but worths money, such as man hours, which means if 100 people worked on it for 6 months then you calculate all the cost of those employees at the same time, and that could be calculated into it.
I doubt that it would be 15 billion already, that just doesn't make sense, what could they really spend that 15 billion on, think about it item by item, doesn't really sound like a true price. Maybe they are just showing it as a cost to pay less taxes I don't know. But in the end, if they can achieve it one day, it would be all worth it.
Of course not directly cash, but worth of it. I admired Mark Zuckerberg as he is the one driving force of the future, the technology he envisioned and trying to make it a reality. He is in esting here,it means it is doable and achievable, just a matter of time.