Investors are paying a hefty price for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the future in the metaverse.
In a very short period of 18 months, Meta's Reality Labs business, which houses the company's virtual reality technology and initiatives, reported a sizable loss of $21 billion, according to Fortune Magazine.
According to the news portal, in the social media company's second-quarter earnings report, it reported that its Reality Labs unit lost $3.7 billion. That brings its losses since the beginning of 2022 to $21.5 billion and its overall losses (since the fourth quarter of 2020) to just shy of $34 billion.
Despite the setbacks, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is "fully committed" to AI and the metaverse, calling them both "major priorities" that complement and overlap, according to the finance news portal.
And he indicated he's not worried about the low engagement numbers for Horizon Worlds, the metaverse manifestation that has, so far, fallen flat.
"For Horizon, the team is focused on retention right now, and we're making good progress on that," he said on an earnings call Wednesday.
"We made big improvements on avatars as well, and that's going to be a bridge between our mobile apps and our VR and mixed reality experiences."
Meanwhile, Bloomberg has reported that Mark Zuckerberg's fortune surged by $4.6 billion Thursday after Meta Platforms Inc. reported strong second-quarter earnings, joining his billionaire peers at Alphabet Inc. in benefiting from a resurgence in advertising spending.
Shares of Menlo Park, California-based Meta, the parent company of Facebook, rose as much as 9% in New York before closing up 4.4%, the most since April.
Mark Zuckerberg has seen his net worth increase by $67.7 billion this year to $113.3 billion, the second-largest increase among those in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index behind only Elon Musk.
Zuckerberg, 39, who ranks 10th on the wealth index, derives most of his fortune from Meta stock, which has gained 159% this year. The social media firm reported strong results for the quarter ended June 30 and gave an optimistic outlook for the current period.
Zuckerberg wasn't the only US technology billionaire having a rosy week. Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin each gained more than $5 billion in net worth Wednesday after the company reported second-quarter revenue that exceeded analysts' expectations, boosted by advertising on its flagship Google search business.
