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Meta's Reality Labs Has Now Lost Over $60 Billion Since 2020 (cnbc.com) 37

Posted by BeauHD from the that's-B-for-billion dept.
Meta's Reality Labs posted a $4.2 billion operating loss in Q1 2025. According to CNBC, cumulative losses since 2020 now exceed $60 billion. From the report: Meta's Reality Labs unit is responsible for the company's Quest-branded virtual reality headsets and Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. It's the key business unit that anchors CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to build a new computing platform involving digital worlds accessible via VR and augmented reality devices. [...]

Wall Street has questioned Meta's big spending on the metaverse, which Zuckerberg has said could take many years to turn into a real business. The company must now also contend with sweeping new tariffs from President Donald Trump and the likely increase in costs that will follow, potentially leading to higher-priced devices. Last week, Meta said that an unspecified number of Reality Labs employees were laid off. Those workers were part of the Oculus Studios unit, which creates VR and AR games and content for Quest VR headsets.

Meta's Reality Labs Has Now Lost Over $60 Billion Since 2020 More | Reply

Meta's Reality Labs Has Now Lost Over $60 Billion Since 2020

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  • It's a battle of wits where neither side has the weaponry to compete!

    Zuckerberg: "Second Life seems cool. I can do it better, except not at all." Fail.

    Wall Street: "Profit now, profit later, profit always. It's the only thing that will ever matter, and humanity's purpose." Fail

    Normally I'd just rail at Wall Street's shortsightedness, but in this particular case I can't really say that either side has a lock on something with potential. Wall Street is shortsighted, yes, but Zuckerberg is deluded. It's a classic lose-lose situation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Unfortunately the Facebook IPO was structured such that Zuckerberg controls the voting shares. Wall street doesn't get to say anything unless he's issuing bonds.

      • Unfortunately the Facebook IPO was structured such that Zuckerberg controls the voting shares. Wall street doesn't get to say anything unless he's issuing bonds.

        Oh, they can say anything they want, they just don't have control of the situation. And if there's anything Wall Street can't abide, it's not having control of something.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They didn't actually lose any money. The "loss" is purely on paper. Just like the company, a couple of years ago, that took a 5 billion dollar deduction for "good will impairment". It's a tax-avoidance scam, nothing more.
    • Zuckerberg is an antisemitic Nazi, and Facebook/Meta needs to go the way of Myspace as soon as possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      Second Life? No. Snow Crash came 10 years before and Meta is named after its Metaverse.

  • most money ever spent (Score:4, Funny)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @05:52PM (#65345601)

    That is the most money ever spent on cartoons without legs.

    • They added legs, turns out they got used to run for the exit.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Okay, but it's the only funny... The [obligatory] joke I was looking for was something like "and it couldn't happen to a more deserving [negative label]". I sure feel like Slashdot had more wit and humor in the past...

      You could take this weak comment as encouragement for humor?

  • Lost implies it was just misplaced and waiting to be found, like between a couch cushion or something.

    • If you're wall street R&D is pure loss. Sensible people see an investment, wall street is not sensible. In their mind profit should be immediate, guaranteed and monotonically increasing for eternity.

      However idiotic I think his social vr bullshit idea was, the hardware technology is worthy and needs more investment. The question his investors should have asked if they were serious, is whether he actually believed in his metaverse shit, or that was just a way to leverage his company for a passion project.

  • You need an idea. One that works. Money cannot substitute for that.

  • $10b here, $10b there. Soon you're talking real money. (With apologies to Everett Dirkson, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/... [wikiquote.org])

    It is interesting that Microsoft reported significant revenues from AI will dialing back their investment. But since at least some of that was the force-fed CoPilot price increase for Office365, it's kinda hard to understand how much of that revenue increase was voluntary.

  • I've had a quest 1 since launch day and it's still pretty serviceable as a VR headset for flight sims and stuff. Even with a shiny new GPU and desktop computer to use it with, I might hop in to VR for like 10 min to check out some new novelty thing.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      I don't know if I'll ever use VR more than that.

    • Well, Quest 1 is really outdated these days, except for the OLED having slightly better blacks, but headsets like the Quest 3 or Pico 4 ultra, as the cheaper options, are way better now.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        Having a 200% better VR goggles isn't going to make me put them on my face more often. Quest 1 is perfectly adequate for casual sim gaming etc.

    • I tried apples and it was pretty impressive. Though I wasn’t willing to through down that much for a toy/entertainment device. Nine months later I bought Quest 3 on sale. It isn’t as impressive hardware-wise, but it’s pretty slick over all. The Quest 1, 2, and 3S are not pretty much for low res games only. The 3 has better resolution. Good enough it works pretty well for movies, TV, and watching sports too. I watched an NBA playoff games with a bunch of strangers a week ago and it was kind

  • People who start companies have one idea (Score:4)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @06:58PM (#65345783)
    People who start companies have one great idea.

    They make billions.

    They think they are geniuses, better than normal people.

    They try and come up with another, bigger idea.

    They fail at that, and either go evil ( Google, HP, Dyson ), go back to their old idea ( Apple, Microsoft ), or slowly fade away ( Palm, Facebook ( with a bit of evil on the way ), TomTom, ).

    Musk brought three good ideas to great success ( Zip2, Tesla, Spacex ) and Starlink could probably count as a fourth.

    ( Ob.: Yes, he was a bit of a prick and has gone mad. Not relevant to my point. )

    I just came up with this. There may be valid counter arguments.

  • USD$60 *BILLION!?* (Score:3)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Thursday May 01, 2025 @07:01PM (#65345791) Homepage Journal

    Sixty billion dollars?

    Is there any breakdown of this figure? Even if you paid up front for 100,000 headsets, you might only get to $0.1 billion. Where did all the money go? How many prototypes did they make? Were the optics made out of DeBeers diamonds? Did they use AWS or something?

    • On paper the money went one place, in reality it went into Zuck's coffers so he can lie, cheat, bribe, and steal with the best of them. Zuck's an evil bastard. I wouldn't put anything past him.

    • The money is used to pay staff... Payroll is by far the biggest expense for most businesses.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      I'm with you; even several billion seems like a lot. And that's if we forgive them for the fact that "VR" has already failed before. [wikipedia.org] I mean, if Nintendo couldn't pull it off...

    • Where did all the money go? How many prototypes did they make?

      R&D costs money. This isn't just optics. Meta published a whole fuckton of science on the topic of VR. Everything to improving latency of wireless connections, to determining how visual disconnect causes motion sickness, new hardware developments, developing new distortion mapping systems for wide angle camera feeds (necessary for passthrough), motion detection and translation for body parts, foveated rendering.

      They also bootstrapped the VR gaming industry by running their own game studio with this mone

  • Are just incompetent nepo babies that blundered ass backwards in the billions and billions of dollars.

    As soon as any of them have to do anything outside of either the one thing they blundered into or maybe sucking down another juicy government contract they fail and they fail hard. Usually costing small investors a fuck ton of money. Although somehow the big boys never seem to lose a dime.

  • Ya gotta spend money to lose money

  • Haven't seen a game yet that makes me want to spend that much $$ !
  • They could have switched the majority of the US power grid to renewables with that money. Just let that sink in.
  • First, this is high cost stuff, which not everyone can afford. Second, they've locked everything down tight instead of following the success of Nintendo which opened up their platform for other companies to develop games. I don't have lots of money but I found a used oculas 2 at a thrift store for cheap, so I figured I would try it. Now, they require an app on your phone to even use it, which they didn't originally. More than that, the app isn't usable on my pixel 7 pro, many of the selections/buttons are u

  • Reality labs has lost $60bn over 5 years. While "losing" this money Meta has reported $192bn in net profit over the same period.

    Additionally a department that largely spends money on R&D doesn't "lose" money. An investment in R&D is not a loss until its goal is abandoned which clearly hasn't happened. Big numbers sound scary, but these $60bn are a small and completely not out of the ordinary portion of Meta's yearly revenue. In fact they could have spent that entire sum just last year alone and stil

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