Even the most successful entrepreneurs misjudge the future sometimes. Meta is ending its metaverse project — Horizon Worlds leaves the Quest store in March and goes dark on VR entirely on June 15. Mark Zuckerberg, who staked his company’s name on this vision and spent close to $80 billion pursuing it, has misjudged the timing, the demand, and the difficulty of building a new computing platform from scratch.
The misjudgment was made in good faith. Zuckerberg looked at the history of computing platforms and saw a pattern: mainframes gave way to PCs, PCs gave way to smartphones, and smartphones would give way to immersive spatial computing. He concluded that VR was the next form factor and that the company that built the platform layer of that transition would generate enormous value. Meta would be that company.
Horizon Worlds was supposed to be the early expression of that platform. Built for Quest headsets, it offered virtual social spaces, creative tools, and community events. But the product experience could not compensate for the fundamental challenge of VR adoption. Headsets remained expensive and cumbersome for casual use, and the experiences available on Horizon Worlds were not compelling enough to overcome that friction. User counts in the hundreds of thousands per month reflected those constraints.
Reality Labs posted close to $80 billion in losses over approximately four years, a sustained financial commitment that yielded limited return. Layoffs of more than 1,000 employees in early 2025 preceded the formal strategic shift toward AI — a domain where Meta is better positioned and where the commercial opportunity is more clearly defined.
Zuckerberg’s misjudgment does not define him — the ability to recover from it will. His track record includes genuine successes alongside this failure, and the AI era gives him a new opportunity. But the metaverse will remain a reference point for how even confident, well-resourced leaders can be wrong about the future.