The metaverse is cooked, and Wall Street couldn’t be happier

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It appears Meta may finally be ready to put the metaverse out of its misery.

Shares of the company formerly known as Facebook shot up 7% early Thursday in response to a Bloomberg report that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slashing the metaverse team’s budget by as much as 30%. CNN hasn’t confirmed the report. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that “we are shifting some of our investment” from the metaverse group toward AI glasses and wearables.

The stock ended the day up 3.4%.

It’s not hard to see why Wall Street is so thrilled. After four years and billions of dollars wasted, the metaverse — a feature that Zuck believed in so deeply that he renamed the company after it — is more or less cooked.

The thing never made much sense, even when Zuck dramatically declared the metaverse would be “the successor of the mobile internet.” The company initially set a goal of 500,000 monthly active users in Horizons Worlds, a virtual reality space, by the end of 2022. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta revised that goal by nearly half later that year.

To be clear, we don’t know yet what will become of the metaverse, which is part of Meta’s Reality Labs division overseeing its virtual reality headsets. And Zuckerberg has said he still believes people will one day spend significant amounts of time in virtual worlds.

But the entire project is, to say the least, a far cry from the vast digital idyll of Zuck’s pandemic-era fever dream, and it’s getting shoved to the back of the closet like so many well-intentioned Covid projects.

Investors (and most people using the internet) were skeptical from the start.

The metaverse was a squishy concept, pitched to a populace that had just emerged from Covid lockdowns and wanted little more than to be around other humans offline, in real life. Meta was telling us that the future of social media would be immersive, like a giant Zoom call populated by digital alter egos that can interact and play games and buy stuff from one another for … fun? It wasn’t actually clear what the point was, and regardless, getting there required access to a bulky $400 headset.

Of course, the timing of Meta’s rebrand was also important. Facebook was desperately trying to army crawl out of a swamp of negative headlines linked to whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal detailing how the social media giant repeatedly failed to address problems on its platforms that executives knew were harming users (especially teens).