Being wrong about the next big thing has a specific price in technology. For the metaverse, that price was close to $80 billion. Meta has shut down Horizon Worlds on VR — off the Quest store by March, terminated on June 15 — ending Mark Zuckerberg’s experiment with the full accounting of what it costs to identify the wrong next big thing and invest in it at maximum scale.
The identification error is the first component of the price. Zuckerberg identified VR social platforms as the next big thing in computing. The identification was based on legitimate reasoning about technology trends. But the identification was wrong about timing, and probably wrong about form — the next big thing in computing may involve spatial computing, but it may not involve VR headsets and avatar-based social interaction as the primary interface. The identification was at least partially wrong, and the investment was calibrated to the full vision rather than the validated portion.
The investment error compounds the identification error. Investing at the scale of an inevitable next big thing in a technology that had not demonstrated mainstream readiness produced losses that grew with each year of sustained commitment. Close to $80 billion in Reality Labs losses represents the product of an identification error multiplied by an investment scale appropriate for a correct identification.
The persistence error extends both. Maintaining the investment through four years of disappointing results, through the public mockery and the analyst skepticism and the user data that contradicted the projection, extended the losses beyond what the identification and investment errors alone would have produced. Layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs employees in early 2025 and the formal AI pivot marked the end of the persistence.
The full price of being wrong about the next big thing — identification, investment, and persistence errors combined — was close to $80 billion. The next big thing that Meta is now betting on is AI. The price of being wrong about AI, at the investment scale Meta is applying, would be comparable. The question is whether the lessons from the metaverse price have been genuinely learned.