Author: Curry, Shenchao TechFlow
On October 28, 2021, Zuckerberg stood beside a legless avatar to announce that the company was renaming itself from Facebook to Meta.
At the time, he said the metaverse would reach one billion people within a decade, support hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and create job opportunities for millions of creators and developers.
That year, the metaverse was the sexiest concept on Earth.
Microsoft says it’s building a metaverse version of Teams, NVIDIA has launched Omniverse, and Nike has opened a virtual store on Roblox... no one wants to miss out on this ticket.
Meta didn't just buy a ticket—it bought the entire ship.
Horizon Worlds can now be understood as the key evidence of Meta’s rebranding story—you put on a headset, enter a virtual world, and browse, play, or hold meetings alongside other users’ avatar representations.
When it launched at the end of 2021, it was the flagship product personally endorsed by Zuckerberg. But four and a half years later, not a billion people have joined.
On March 17, Meta posted an announcement on its community forum: the VR version of Horizon Worlds will be permanently shut down on June 15, at which point the app will be removed from Quest headsets and the virtual world will no longer be accessible. A mobile version will remain available on smartphones and continue to operate.
It's like a restaurant that closed its dine-in service and only offers takeout, even though it was originally built for dine-in customers.
The department funding it is called Reality Labs. Over seven years, its cumulative operating losses have approached $90 billion. In the most recent quarter alone, it lost $6 billion on revenue of less than $1 billion—less than one-sixth of its losses.
In January of this year, the department laid off over 1,000 employees, shut down multiple VR content studios, and canceled nearly all virtual world projects still in development.
The ticket everyone feared missing in 2021 is now in your hand, but the ship has sunk.
In mid-March, Reuters reported that Meta is planning to lay off approximately 20% of its workforce, nearly 15,000 employees. If implemented, this would be the largest round of layoffs since 2022.
Meanwhile, Meta's capital expenditure budget for this year is $115 billion to $135 billion, almost entirely directed toward AI infrastructure.
Shut down the virtual world, lay off one-fifth of the staff, and redirect all the saved funds and vacant positions into AI.
On the day the news broke, Meta's stock price rose by 3%. When Zuckerberg announced in 2021 that he was fully betting on the metaverse, capital markets cheered just the same.
The answer was already on the table the day before Horizon Worlds announced its shutdown.
The virtual world closes; the personal computer takes center stage.
On March 16, Manus, acquired by Meta for $2 billion, launched its desktop version.
There is a feature called "My Computer" that allows the AI to descend from the cloud and directly access your local computer: read files, launch applications, and run terminal commands.
This event occurred the day before Horizon Worlds announced its shutdown.
In the year Horizon Worlds launched, the experience was like this:
You spend two to three thousand dollars on a Quest headset, put it on, adjust the interpupillary distance, set up your safety boundary, and then enter a cartoon-style virtual lobby. Everyone in there has no legs and floats as they move. You can explore themed worlds, play mini-games, and chat with strangers’ avatars.
After half an hour, the headset starts pressing on the face; after an hour, some people begin to feel dizzy.
Meta spent four years and $90 billion on this platform—and never disclosed its active user count. Not because it’s confidential, but because the numbers look bad.
The Manus Desktop experience is as follows:
You download an app, open it, and enter a single phrase—such as “Organize the thousands of files in my Downloads folder by type.” The app scans your hard drive, automatically creates subfolders, and sorts and archives your files—all without you touching the keyboard.
In the demo, someone had it write a macOS app from scratch in a local development environment in just 20 minutes. Don’t forget that Manus, which launched eight months ago, has surpassed one million paying users and generated annual revenue exceeding $100 million.
When everyone says Meta’s acquisition of Manus isn’t worth it, consider comparing it to the previously shut-down metaverse project, Horizon Worlds.
A product that spends $90 billion to lure you into a virtual world, but no one shows up. Another that spends $2 billion to bring itself onto your real desktop, with real revenue and practical use cases—which one would you choose?
Same company, same week: shut down the former, bet on the latter.
Previously, Meta created a world for you to enter; now, AI walks through the screen toward you.
But getting the direction right doesn't mean the path became smooth. After turning around, Meta doesn't appear any more composed.
Metaverse and AI might be the same FOMO.
If you only read the headlines, Meta now looks like a company making one bad decision after another.
The metaverse burned through $90 billion and shut down. The flagship AI model, Avocado, originally scheduled for a March release, has been delayed to May after internal testing revealed its reasoning and programming capabilities lag behind those of Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic’s current offerings.
The previous Llama 4 received a lukewarm response after its release last year and failed to generate much buzz in the developer community. Reports suggest the company even considered temporarily licensing Google’s Gemini to serve as a stopgap for its own products—a company that spent $135 billion on AI infrastructure needing to rely on another’s model.
Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has left to start his own company; the new AI head, Alexandr Wang, hired for $14.3 billion from Scale AI, has yet to deliver results...
A 20% workforce reduction, shutting down the metaverse, and a delayed model—all within one week—make it look like a company that doesn’t know what it wants to do.
But if you look away from Meta and examine the entire industry, you'll notice one thing:
Everyone is doing exactly the same thing—fully embracing AI.
In February this year, Block’s CEO Jack Dorsey announced the layoff of 4,000 employees, nearly half the company’s workforce. The layoff letter contained no embellishment, directly stating that intelligent tools had transformed how companies are built and operated, enabling smaller teams to accomplish more. The stock price rose 25% that evening.
Shopify's CEO sent a new policy to the entire company: anyone wishing to hire additional staff must first prove that AI cannot do the job.
Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in January and restructured its robotics division in March. Atlassian laid off 1,600 people, stating it would redirect all resources toward AI enterprise software.
In the first 74 days of 2026, 166 tech companies laid off nearly 56,000 people.
Does this scene look familiar to you?
In 2021, it was the same: after Zuckerberg renamed the company Meta, Microsoft announced plans to develop a metaverse version of Teams, NVIDIA launched Omniverse, Nike opened a virtual store on Roblox, Disney established a metaverse division, and Shanghai and Seoul released metaverse strategic plans...
Everyone is chasing the same direction, and everyone fears missing out.
Five years have passed, the direction has changed, but the approach remains the same.
Last time, the consensus was that "the metaverse is the next computing platform," and Meta spent $90 billion proving that consensus wrong. This time, the consensus is that "AI can replace everything," and every company is laying off staff, cutting budgets, and pouring the saved money into AI.
The only difference is that the previous consensus has been falsified, while this one has not.
But consensus is consensus. It’s characterized by everyone believing at the same time, and then everyone realizing it’s wrong at the same time. The time gap in between is the rate at which money is burned.
Meta isn't a dumber company than others—it just bets bigger every time, so when consensus shifts, it falls the hardest.
In 2021, the entire industry bet on the metaverse, and Meta changed its name. In 2026, the entire industry bets on AI, and Meta laid off one-fifth of its workforce.
Looking back five years from now, did everyone bet correctly on this AI wave?
No one knows. But we all know that when this question was asked in 2021, everyone’s answer was “Of course.”