THE DESCENT OF MARK ZUCKERBERG:

Mark Zuckerberg is in a lot of trouble. He has turned away from the slog of running Facebook to focus almost entirely on his ‘metaverse’, a vision of the internet where people enter interactive virtual spaces using virtual reality (VR) headsets. He has pledged investment of at least $10 billion a year for a decade, and investors have been told that profits will be lower for the next decade as a result. He saw the digital future once. Can he repeat the trick?

Right now, it seems not. His company’s stock price has more than halved, wiping $600 billion off its market value. Shareholders are worried. Meta is to cut expenses by at least 10 per cent in the coming months, in part through redundancies. More cuts are expected.

Last week’s Meta conference – held in the metaverse, aptly enough – failed to change the mood. The announcements of a $1,499 VR headset and the dramatic introduction of legs for metaverse avatars did little to convince the markets this really is the future: Meta’s share price is down almost 25 per cent just in the past month. Zuckerberg’s personal wealth has shrunk by more than $76 billion this year so far.

There’s an obvious problem with Zuckerberg’s vision: who wants to wear a clunky virtual reality headset, watching outdated graphics that induce nausea? In a world where most of us use the internet via our mobile phones, can this really be the future? The figures suggest not: Meta expected 500,000 active monthly users on its VR platform, Horizon Worlds (which is accessed by VR headsets), by the end of this year; the current figure is fewer than 200,000. Leaked internal documents show that most of those who visit Horizon tend not to return after the first month. Meta staff themselves are reportedly unsure of the product: ‘The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?’ wrote Meta’s metaverse vice-president Vishal Shah in a memo last month.

The iPad was inspired by a prop in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The flip phone by the Star Trek communicator. But apparently the world isn’t ready to move into a clunky impersonation of Star Trek’s holodecks just yet.