Hello, welcome to the back door to monarchy episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Sampone of Axios.

I'm here with Stacey Marie Ishmael of Bloomberg.

Hello.

We're also here with Emily Peck of Fundrise.

Hello. Hi.

Hello.

And we are going to talk about rich men this week because apparently on a money show, this is inevitable on a regular basis.

We are going to talk about all of the billionaires who have managed to avoid a billionaire tax and why that might be.

We are going to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who's extremely rich and who has pivoted his company.

We're going to talk about Elon Musk and Tesla and how his new deal with Hertz might change

things around. We're going to talk about in Slate Plus. We're going to talk about Edward Rogers,

who is attempting a very succession style coup up in Canada. It's all manner of

fun and games all coming up on Slate Money. Mark Zuckerberg, thank you very much for

rebranding your company and forcing us to talk about what I guess

we should now be calling meta rather than Facebook, although I suspect that people are still going to

call Facebook Facebook, much like they still talk about National Airport. Stacey, give me a quick picture of what did Mark Zuckerberg announce and does it matter?

What Mark Zuckerberg announced this week is that Facebook, as he has alluded to several times

in the past, is really betting its present and future on the idea of what's called the Metaverse, this immersive,

experiential, virtual reality, video game-y-feeling situation in which all of our quote-unquote

real-life interactions will happen in environments that seem to come more from science fiction than they do the real world.

So he's investing a bunch of money into Oculus, which is the sort of headset company that he bought.

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