Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook for the metaverse. Four years and $70 billion in losses later, he’s moving on

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg recast Facebook as Meta and declared the metaverse—a digital realm where people would work, socialize, and spend much of their lives—the company’s next great frontier. He framed it as the “successor to the mobile internet” and said Meta would be “metaverse-first.”The hype wasn’t all him. Grayscale, the investment firm specializing in crypto, called the metaverse a “trillion-dollar revenue opportunity.” Barbados even opened up an embassy in Decentraland, one of the worlds in the met ...