The financial cost of the metaverse is close to $80 billion. The identity cost may be even harder to calculate. Meta is shutting down Horizon Worlds on VR — removed from Quest in March, terminated on June 15 — ending Mark Zuckerberg’s experiment after losses that are measured both in dollars and in the company’s sense of who it is and what it stands for.
When Zuckerberg renamed Facebook as Meta in 2021, he was making a statement about identity. The company would no longer be defined by social networking — it would be defined by the construction of virtual reality as the next computing platform. That identity was meant to be galvanizing internally, differentiating externally, and enduring strategically. It was meant to last decades.
It lasted less than four years before the platform that gave it meaning began its shutdown. Horizon Worlds failed to attract the users needed to justify the identity claim. Monthly active user figures in the hundreds of thousands made it impossible to seriously argue that Meta was building the next great computing platform. The company’s name described an aspiration rather than an achievement.
Reality Labs registered close to $80 billion in losses during the identity experiment. More than 1,000 employees were laid off in early 2025, and Meta began repositioning itself around AI — a technology that has nothing to do with the metaverse and everything to do with the competitive moment Meta currently faces. The identity has shifted again, implicitly acknowledging that the first shift was a mistake.
The residual identity problem for Meta is that its name still means metaverse to many people — and the metaverse now means failure. Building an AI identity that is distinct and credible will require more than strategic announcements. It will require delivering AI products that people genuinely value and use at scale. Until that happens, the company named Meta will carry the weight of the identity it chose and the failure that identity produced.