Meta CTO: 2025 to Decide If Metaverse Was ‘Legendary Misadventure’

Four years after Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta after the metaverse, which it believed was the next big thing in tech, the tech giant looks to be ready to pull the plug on this money pit.

In a memo seen by Business Insider, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees in Reality Labs — the home of its metaverse and wearables products — that “this year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure.”

The CTO’s internal memo, titled “2025: The Year of Greatness,” also said: “We need to drive sales, retention and engagement across the board but especially in MR (mixed reality).”

“And Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long-term plans to have a chance,” Bosworth wrote.

Horizon Worlds is an immersive, virtual reality world where avatars interact with each other like in the real world. But hampering greater usage has always been the bulky AR/VR headsets needed to play in the metaverse.

In 2024, Reality Labs lost $17.7 billion from operations on revenue of $2.15 billion, according to Meta’s latest earnings report.

During the latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that 2025 will be a “pivotal year for the metaverse.” While the number of users of Quest and Horizon has been “steadily growing,” he said, “we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon’s trajectory by the end of this year.”

Shifting Focus to AI

Even as Meta continued to pour billions into its metaverse projects, Zuckerberg has been pivoting toward artificial intelligence (AI), a tech trend that emerged since renaming his company Meta.

During the earnings call and analyst Q&A, Zuckerberg and executives only mentioned metaverse four times, while AI was mentioned dozens of times. Meta Quest, which is its AR/VR headset, was only mentioned once.

The CTO said in the memo that Meta is getting ready to launch half a dozen more AI-powered wearables, but did not give more specifics.

Meta’s AI-powered Ray-Ban smart glasses sold one million pairs in 2024, but the company still isn’t sure it would be a break-out hit in the long run.

Meta CFO Susan Li said in the earnings call that this year’s spending on Reality Labs will be split between the metaverse and wearables products. She noted that there is still “a deep technological set of challenges” the lab needs to solve before it can sell its products at scale.

Li said spending in Reality Labs will increase in 2025 from the year before, and operating losses also will increase.