Mark Zuckerberg.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has made almost $50 billion in losses for Metaverse in less than five years.
The department’s total loss of $47 billion exceeds the market value of automaker Ford, chocolate maker Hershey or food company Kraft Heinz.
Nike’s Phil Knight, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin are all worth less on paper.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Insider. It was automatically translated and checked by a real editor. We welcome feedback at the end of the article.
Mark Zuckerberg’s meta has accumulated a total of almost $50 billion in Metaverse losses. A sum that dwarfs the market value of many well-known companies and the wealth of some of the richest people in the world.
The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has lost a cumulative $47 billion in its Reality Labs division since the beginning of 2019. This was the result of an analysis of official documents by Business Insider. The segment’s operating loss widened from under $5 billion in 2019 to over $10 billion in 2021. There was a loss of almost $14 billion in 2022. This year it is north of $11 billion in the first nine months.
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Zuckerberg and his team expect this trend to continue. “We expect our RL operating losses to increase significantly in 2024,” it says Third quarter results by Meta. “Many of our RL investments are focused on long-term, innovative research and development of products for the Metaverse that may not be fully realized until the next decade.”
Meta’s Metaverse losses to date exceed the market capitalization of many companies. These include, for example, the car manufacturer Ford (45 billion US dollars), coffee machine manufacturer Keurig Dr. Pepper (41 billion US dollars), chocolate manufacturer Hershey (39 billion US dollars) and food producer Kraft Heinz (39 billion US dollars). They could soon overtake sportswear retailer Lululemon ($49 billion), fast-food chain Chipotle ($50 billion), discount retailer Target ($51 billion) and beverage maker Monster Beverage ($52 billion) in size.
If Meta’s $47 billion were an individual’s net worth, it would be in the “Bloomberg Billionaires Index“rank among the top 25 places. That puts it ahead of Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his family ($39 billion), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ($36 billion) and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin ($35 billion). They would also be worth almost half as much as Zuckerberg ($105 billion).
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Zuckerberg continues to look into the future
It is important to emphasize that the Metaverse business is only a small part of Meta as a whole. Zuckerberg’s company generated $94 billion in sales between January and September. In its main division, Family of Apps, operating profit was $42 billion. This compares to the one billion US dollars in sales and a loss of 11.5 billion US dollars in the RL business. As a result, Meta still generated over $30 billion in operating income during this period.
Zuckerberg has been championing virtual reality, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies for years. When his company acquired VR pioneer Oculus in 2014, he envisioned that every person in the world could feel like they were courtside at an NBA game, on stage at a Taylor Swift concert, or at a Harvard lecture to sit in the front row.
It’s unclear whether Zuckerberg’s big bet on the metaverse will ultimately pay off. But the Metaverse losses in this area are definitely significant and will continue to grow in the next few years.
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