How Did the Metaverse Fail So Badly?
Patrick Boyle On Finance
Patrick Boyle
4.9 • 308 Ratings
🗓️ 12 April 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stood in front of the world and announced that the future of human interaction would be something called the metaverse. He was so confident about this that he renamed his three-billion-user company after it. Over the following four years, Meta spent $88 billion building a virtual world that almost nobody visited, featuring avatars that — for reasons that were never fully explained — did not have legs. Wall Street predicted five billion users. Consultants declared it too big to ignore. A man paid $450,000 to become Snoop Dogg's virtual neighbour. The metaverse peaked at around 900 daily users. This is the story of what went wrong, and what it cost.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stood in front of the world and announced that he was renaming |
| 0:06.6 | Facebook meta. |
| 0:08.3 | The future of the company and indeed the future of human interaction itself would be something |
| 0:14.0 | called the Metaverse. |
| 0:15.9 | Our hope is that within the next decade, the Metaverse will reach a billion people. |
| 0:21.3 | He said that it would host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce. |
| 0:26.2 | People would work there, socialize there, attend concerts there, and presumably never wonder |
| 0:32.2 | why they were doing all of these things while wearing a television strap to their face. |
| 0:38.6 | Teleporting around the Metaverse, Zuckerberg explained, would be like clicking a link |
| 0:43.3 | on the internet, which is of course how everyone already teleports around the internet by clicking |
| 0:50.1 | links on it. The timing of this announcement was entirely coincidental. It had absolutely |
| 0:57.0 | nothing to do with the fact that Facebook was experiencing one of its worst ever press cycles, |
| 1:03.0 | that a whistleblower had just testified before the US Senate a few weeks earlier about how |
| 1:08.4 | the company put profits over safety, or that regulators on both |
| 1:12.9 | sides of the Atlantic were circling. |
| 1:15.5 | The decision to rename a 3 billion user company after a concept from a science fiction |
| 1:21.4 | novel in which the main character delivers pizza for the mafia was purely strategic. Facebook was not the most original idea |
| 1:30.7 | to begin with. Social networks like Friendster and MySpace existed long before Facebook launched, |
| 1:37.7 | and Zuckerberg famously lost a lawsuit to the Winklevoss twins for stealing their idea, |
| 1:43.6 | which they hadn't really come up with either. |
| 1:46.6 | What Zuckerberg did really well was execution. He launched Facebook through elite universities, |
| 1:53.8 | making it a status symbol before slowly opening it to the rest of the world. After that, |
... |
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