APOLOGIES TO THE PERSON READING THIS ON VR GOGGLES: The metaverse is cooked, and Wall Street couldn’t be happier.

It appears Meta may finally be ready to put the metaverse out of its misery.

Shares of the company formerly known as Facebook shot up 7% early Thursday in response to a Bloomberg report that CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slashing the metaverse team’s budget by as much as 30%. CNN hasn’t confirmed the report. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that “we are shifting some of our investment” from the metaverse group toward AI glasses and wearables.

The stock ended the day up 3.4%.

It’s not hard to see why Wall Street is so thrilled. After four years and billions of dollars wasted, the metaverse — a feature that Zuck believed in so deeply that he renamed the company after it — is more or less cooked.

The thing never made much sense, even when Zuck dramatically declared the metaverse would be “the successor of the mobile internet.” The company initially set a goal of 500,000 monthly active users in Horizons Worlds, a virtual reality space, by the end of 2022. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta revised that goal by nearly half later that year.

To be clear, we don’t know yet what will become of the metaverse, which is part of Meta’s Reality Labs division overseeing its virtual reality headsets. And Zuckerberg has said he still believes people will one day spend significant amounts of time in virtual worlds.

Virtual reality was Silicon Valley’s big obsession in the late 1980s before the World Wide Web came along, so it wasn’t surprising to see Zuckerberg reviving VR fever — nor is it a big surprise to see it fail. As I wrote last year when Apple debuted their stillborn Vision Pro goggles, Hollywood sci-fi has been conditioning us since Star Trek debuted in 1966 to consume information via screens, not via goggles, which helps to explain the much smaller demand from the public.