Mark Zuckerberg Renamed His Entire Company for the Metaverse. Four Years and $70 Billion Later, He's Cutting It by 30%.

In the most expensive corporate rebrand in history, Zuckerberg bet his company's entire identity on the metaverse — a digital realm where people would supposedly work, socialize, and live their digital lives. He changed the company name from Facebook to Meta, declared VR headsets would replace smartphones, and predicted the metaverse would "reach a billion people within a decade." The result? Reality Labs has burned through more than $70 billion since 2021, the virtual world Decentraland peaked at 38 daily active users, and their avatars looked like rejected Wii characters. By late 2025, Zuckerberg quietly started slashing Reality Labs' budget by 30% — roughly $5 billion in cuts. The company's earnings calls don't even mention "metaverse" anymore. Wall Street cheered the retreat, adding $69 billion in market cap on news of the cuts. The new corporate obsession? AI. Meta now plans to spend $72 billion on AI in 2026 alone — nearly matching everything it lost on the metaverse. At least they didn't rename the company "Arti."