8 ms·
Meta's value has plunged by $700B. Wall Street calls it a “train wreck.”
- Finnucane 4y agoThe rest of us call it 'a good start'.
- smt88 4y agoBillions of dollars for <200k users is a "good start"? TikTok, BeReal, Gas, and even Meta's social networks (FB, IG, and WhatsApp) all performed at least an order of magnitude better than that for the amount of money spent. Imagine any other video game spending that budget and selling less than a million copies. It would be the laughing stock of the industry.
- tpxl 4y agoI believe the parent poster may be referring to this being a good start to facebook failing, not a good start for their VR project.
- oliveshell 4y agoYep. For those who haven’t heard it, there’s an old joke that goes something like: “What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!” Yes, it’s tasteless, but it gives the context within which I interpreted the parent comment.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- koyanisqatsi 4y agoIt's a recession.
- mpweiher 4y agoWell, since 1 year ago, Apple stock is down 2.7% whereas Facebook is down 69%. I think there may be some FB-specific issues at play...
- tamaharbor 4y agoFirst it was MySpace, and now this.
- sn0w_crash 4y agoNice
- fred_is_fred 4y agoWhich is a great reason to not blow $15B on a shitty version of 2nd life.
- AustinDev 4y agoWell they blew more than 30B on share buy backs with an average price above $300/share. It makes the metaverse investment look trivial.
- MrMan 4y agoI have had arguments with a lot of buy side and MBA types who try to convince me that buybacks are good for the country and patriotic but I would prefer a dividend by god. buybacks to me are un-American especially those funded by debt.
- musicale 4y agoHow much would it cost to buy second life itself? Though I imagine they might not want to sell to FB.
- koyanisqatsi 4y agoI mean it's his money, right? He can do whatever he wants with it. Corporations are not democracies and it doesn't matter what market analysts think about how he should spend his own money and on what projects.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MBCook 4y agoThey spent $9,000,000,000 on the Metaverse in the first 9 months of this year. That’s $1 billion a month. They are currently peaking at 200k monthly users (who may only spend 5m a month). Honestly that’s way higher than I’d have guessed. I wonder what the number would be if you filtered to people who spent over 5 hours or logged on at least twice a week? Anyway that’s $5,000 per user per month. $60,000 per user per year. You could easily find people who would sit in the Metaverse all day every day for less than that because it would pay more than their job. What an insane burn rate. On a product even the product’s developers don’t want to use. And this is the future of the company?
- smt88 4y agoHorizon Worlds (or whatever it's called) is probably among the biggest failures in the history of business. Any sane shareholder would oust Zuckerberg at this point, but sadly the only vote that matters is his.
- ThalesX 4y agoI have a Quest 2 for a year now and keep trying from time to time to download the app to experience it. It's not available in my region. If that's not pure metaverse irony, I'm not sure what is.
- anm89 4y agoEvery person gets to vote by holding or not holding shares. A massive amount of people have voted against Zuckerberg and metaverse by dumping stock
- smt88 4y agoNo amount of stock selloff can get Zuckerberg fired. He has absolute control over the company.
- ksec 4y agoA few days ago I asked this exact same question. And I have been told by HN comments that in the US he would still be sued even if the shareholders have non-voting rights and Zukerberg has absolute control of the company.
- bezoz 4y ago(Disclaimer: i am an ex meta employee) This is unfortunate because genuinely i like where they are going with VR and they have pushed the technology forward considerably. Their metaverse vision makes no sense to me though but hopefully they course correct I do hope meta recovers from this. The real risk is going to be mark’s mental health and his ability to stay focused amongst this insanity. We shall see
- cuteboy19 4y agoThe investor meeting did not inspire confidence. He seems to be all in and has no plans of course correction
- cityzen 4y ago
- drlobster 4y agoDon't be a big meanie
- thatguy0900 4y agoSomeone should have told zuck this when he decided that spreading extremism was a fantastic business model. And calling his users dumb fucks,of course
- jmeister 4y agoYou're leaving out a million grandparents who keep up with their grandkids' milestones across oceans through FB(like mine), and the countless old friendships rekindled(like mine). American exceptionalism?
- seattle_spring 4y agoHN confuses me sometimes. So we are against FB because it "spreads extremism", yet we're claiming that any and all moderation is a violation of free speech. Wat?
- brooklynite429 4y agoThey are spending $1 billion dollars a month on the metaverse for what? I really don't see it. Mark doesn't have the taste to take this plane airborne. VR, moreso than other platforms, will require great design, artistry, music. I haven't seen anything in Meta's VR foray that looks interesting, well designed, nifty or just plain cool. It's a very reductive interpretation of virtual reality . You have a limitless sandbox and the most creative thing you can show is...meeting software? A complete lack of imagination. Doesn't help that Mark himself keeps talking about the future - the next five, eight, ten years. He himself even admits the experience is not where it should be. Why would anyone buy any of this stuff then? Can't wait to see what Apple is putting together.
- makeitrain 4y agoMaybe it’s about finding VR tech to patent before anyone else.
- ThalesX 4y ago> VR, moreso than other platforms, will require great design, artistry, music. VRChat has some amazing experiences. In a way, it's a lot closer to being a Metaverse than Meta.
- lumost 4y agoThere's a non-trivial chance that there is a reality distortion field around VR due to FB investment levels. What if there is no future once FB pulls the plug? I barely even hear about enthusiasts using VR.
- rcarr 4y agoOne lad who works at a Subway near me absolutely loves VR and talks to me about it every time I go in. But he uses Valve hardware and says he wouldn’t go near Meta stuff with a barge pole.
- thatguy0900 4y agoI bought the original steam vr headset when it came out far before FB. Reality is there is only a handful of vr games that are really worth the entry price. Beat Saber is the only one I find myself going through the hassle of hooking the thing up regularly for. The Google vr movies are a great experience though to watch people play who have never used a vr headset. Watching my parents in those movies was like watching a kid play with his first toy. If you made something like a Pixar movie with the ability to freely move around the scene, I could see that being a humongous hit with children.
- SevenNation 4y agoThis leaves company shares with a price to earnings ratio of 12. Given the size of the company and difficulty such companies have growing, this looks to be about fair value. An investor with a long time horizon and the ability to see past the obvious social ill this company is committing might find a good entry point soon.
- dclusin 4y agoOr a would-be employee.
- nocoiner 4y agoNormally I’d agree with you, but here’s where I think perpetual voting control by Zuck fatally undermines that investment thesis. If he were content to manage a stable (or declining) company and throw off cash to his shareholders for the next several decades, that’d be one thing. But instead he has ultimate decision to continue writing ten-digit company checks every month to pursue the metaverse.
- pascalxus 4y agoI assume this means that employee compensation is nearly half what was before, since almost half of the comp is just stock, right? With the astronomical COL over there, those employees in palo alto are probably gonna be hurting really bad next year and beyond.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- datavirtue 4y agoNot to mention that they already owe or have paid the taxes on that "income."
- erik_seaberg 4y agoIs it common for a company to spend money on share buybacks for equity comp? Most equity agreements I’ve been offered said the board intended to authorize a fresh batch of shares for it.
- Ecstatify 4y agoI think Zuck is more delusional than Kanye at this stage. Let’s create a product where we can have Microsoft Teams meetings in VR. People hate meetings regardless if they’re in person or online … VR isn’t going to solve that.
- quantified 4y agoA number of commenters here are curious about where the $1B/month actually goes. How much is cash and how much is accounting stuff? How much is on people, on VR hardware, on datacenter stuff, on airfare to safe spaces?
- sn0w_crash 4y agoLol @ “airfare to safe spaces”
- anm89 4y agoI think if you look beyond the easy but correct narrative of the metaverse, you'd find that Facebook was in a very tricky situation even if they had never jumped into the metaverse bonfire. Facebook at its core is bullshit. It's a growth story but they've got a user base that rounds up to every human on the planet. There's no more 5x or 10x growth to achieve. And this is even before you get into is all this add spend even producing results or worth anything close to the amount of revenue they are getting in the short term? People often incorrectly lable these never-ending growth stories as ponzischemes but they clearly aren't. It's own unique kind of scheme that combines the payoff characteristics of a ponzi scheme with a real business with a growth story that can never be delivered on. All said and done, these tech infinite growth investment schemes are probably just as pernicious as ponzi schemes. The losses are already drastically larger from the perspective of the people who bought into the top of this one or the last one Facebook lost more today than the entirety of madoffs career and so independently did amazon.
- polishdude20 4y agoYeah Facebook is operating like a startup that is expecting high growth year over year. But a big company like that just can't do it anymore. The problem is, it's really hard for big succesful companies to just rest on their laurels. Their shareholders demand more growth.
- faangiq 4y agoDoes this put Zuck in contention for Worst CEO of All Time?
- Gigachad 4y agoWell since he started from 0. His net change can never be negative. More than can be said for many CEOs.
- FrontierPsych 4y agoI, like many, have read that porn drives most technology changes. If this is true, where's the porn in the metaverse? There was one reporter, a woman, whos graphical image was groped, so that is weird. Will you be able to be convicted of actual crime in the metaverse? If you destroy someone else's character, can you be put into actual jail? If you grope a woman online, can you be put in jail? Like in reddit or here, if you say something they don't like, can you be kicked off of the metaverse? Do you have to give your actual information, real life info, to be on the metaverse? For 100% sure I would never do this. There are a lot of problems with the whole thing in my view.
- discardable_dan 4y agoThe problem is nobody wants to use a device whose main login is a real-name social media account to view porn. Meta needs to completely split its Facebook /Insta logins from Meta accounts, moving them to something more akin to Apple logins.
- papa_bear 4y agoDidn’t they do this months ago?
- 31337Logic 4y agoMeta built a box that nobody asked for, nobody needs, nobody cares for. Now they're trying to force us into their box. How's that for a bad business model?