Zuckerberg Humiliated as $70 Billion Flagship Metaverse Project Shuts Down

Tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg is abandoning ship on a social media project once envisioned to be a cornerstone of Meta’s leap into the metaverse. Horizon Worlds is winding down as a social network and game space meant for users of the Quest virtual reality headset. The decline of this much-hyped VR product is happening at breakneck speed, with the app turning into a 2D mobile app at the end of March. This is just the latest setback for Zuckerberg’s stumble into the metaverse, which motivated the name change from Facebook to Meta. The company laid off more than 1,000 employees from its metaverse division, Reality Labs. The tech CEO initially had high hopes for the metaverse. “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg once said. But, as CNBC reports, this goal has faced strong headwinds as customers are skeptical of the 3D world. Reality Labs reported billions of dollars of losses as a result, prompting the company to look instead to advancing its artificial intelligence offerings.