Facebook spent billions on the metaverse and all they got was a new name

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Facebook spent billions on the metaverse and all they got was a new name

10 June 2026

A postmortem, perhaps, of the metaverse, particularly as envisaged by Meta, by Nick Heer.

A number of other big tech players also had visions of an all encompassing immersive, digital realm, but aside from sometimes considerable expenditure, not a whole lot came of it.

From where we are now, several years later, the connection between the COVID pandemic, and Facebook’s announcement they were effectively going all-in on the metaverse, couldn’t be clearer.

The world was in the midst of seemingly endless lockdowns, and stay at home mandates. The metaverse pitch was certainly persuasive. We couldn’t live in the real world, so how about instead a vast virtual domain? Who couldn’t help but be excited by the prospect?

I went as far as setting-up a metaverse tag here, which tellingly, hasn’t been used in three years.

But the world we find ourselves in, nearly five years later, couldn’t be much further removed from that of late 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of what was then Facebook, unveiled his vision of the metaverse.

But let’s give Zuckerberg some due here. He had known something big, something groundbreaking, was in our future, declaring three years earlier in 2018, that “every ten to fifteen years or so, there’s a major new computing paradigm.”

The thing of course is this new paradigm turned out to be something else all together.

The Metaverse, one step closer to the Holodeck

1 November 2021

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social network company he co-founded in 2004 will be known as Meta. Later, in his keynote presentation at the company Connect event, he unveiled a raft of technologies in development that have the potential to change the way we live and work.

The Star Trek geek in me could not help but make comparisons to the Holodeck, a room on the star-ship Enterprise allowing the crew to realistically create, or re-create, almost any situation they could imagine. If you have a spare eighty or so minutes, check out Zuckerberg’s keynote. Tech analyst Ben Thompson interviewed the Facebook CEO shortly before the keynote, and if you have another forty-five minutes to spare, it’s a conversation well worth listening to.