Building the future is expensive — and when you get it wrong, the price is extraordinary. Meta is shutting down Horizon Worlds on VR by June 15, having already begun pulling it from the Quest store in March. Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse project, which cost his company close to $80 billion, is now being discontinued in favor of artificial intelligence and wearable technology.

The decision to bet on the metaverse came from a place of genuine strategic conviction. Zuckerberg in 2021 saw Facebook’s core business maturing and looked for the next wave of technological disruption. He concluded that immersive virtual reality was the answer — a platform shift as significant as the move from desktop to mobile. He renamed his company and aligned every major resource with that conclusion.

Horizon Worlds was the consumer product that would validate the theory. It offered virtual spaces, social interaction, and creative tools — all within a VR environment accessible through Meta’s Quest headsets. But the experience never became compelling enough to drive mass adoption. User numbers reportedly stalled in the hundreds of thousands, and the platform felt underpopulated, which made the social experience it promised fundamentally hollow.

Reality Labs bore the cost. Close to $80 billion in losses accumulated between 2020 and early 2025, making the metaverse one of the most expensive corporate experiments ever recorded. Layoffs of more than 1,000 Reality Labs workers in January 2025 marked the formal beginning of the retreat, as Meta began investing instead in AI systems and augmented reality wearables.

The public response was blunt. Many observers argued that Zuckerberg had simply been wrong — about what people wanted, what technology was ready for, and what the market could support. The closure of the metaverse is not necessarily the end of the story, but it is the end of this chapter. Whether the AI chapter will read differently remains to be seen.