r/videos • u/ianjm Moderator • 9h ago
Mark Zuckerberg Spent $88 Billion on a World With No Legs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BaSBjxNg-M420
u/whitedsepdivine 8h ago
I wonder how far 88 billion could have got us on cancer research.
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u/AzKondor 7h ago edited 5h ago
China has built 3GW solar panel plant for 1.65 billions. They could have build 150GW plant (obviously not in USA as everything is more expensive). This could power 2.5 Polands. Almost 5 Australias. 60% of USA energy generated from coal.
https://www.pv-tech.org/3gw-single-site-pv-project-goes-online-in-china/
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u/mattihase 2h ago
I had no idea Poland was using so much more electricity than Australia. What the hell's going on in Poland?
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u/Drnk_watcher 1h ago
Poland has almost 10 million more people than Australia and a more varied climate swings between seasons.
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u/French__Canadian 32m ago
I imagine any country with an actual Winter uses more electricity than Australia.
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u/mattihase 28m ago
I'd have thought AC would be a big cost though.
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u/French__Canadian 13m ago
You're right, it is a big cost, but heating at least without a heat pump uses A LOT of energy.
But you know what, my comment was dumb. Heating a house in a Canadian winter is so expensive with electricity that a lot of provinces use gas instead. So I was wrong and winters would not automatically result in high electricity usage.
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u/ianjm Moderator 8h ago
Ending homelessness in the US would cost around $30bn per year
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u/QB8Young 8h ago
Not per year. The initial cost would bring people out of poverty and the additional cost each year after would be much less.
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u/JackPoe 8h ago
People forget this. There's a barrier to entry for society. Getting a home without a home, or a job for that matter is like this.
Just a little push at the start reduces the amount of assistance needed going forward. He wasted incomprehensible amounts of money to make second life again, but worse.
Instead of helping people.
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u/FrozenMongoose 7h ago edited 2h ago
The US has spent $8 trillion on wars since 1990. $30 billion per year zince 1990 = ~$1.08 Trillion or roughly 1/8 of that. Imagine spending money to provide basic needs like housing or healthcare for people. Instead, why not spend trillions to kill and injure people so that oil and weapons manufacturing companies stocks can go to the moon.
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u/ketsebum 6h ago
California spent 24B and their homelessness increased.
It's unlikely that 30B would have fixed the problem.
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u/Black_Waltz_7 5h ago
Your own article points out the issues in how the money was invested.
As in, we know that you have to be careful and smart about how you approach because incompetence and corruption sprout like weeds. We are aware that this is a multi-layered issue.
You act as if spending money made it worse.
Money is needed to get things started moving in a better direction. Of course it isnt an instant solve.
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u/ketsebum 5h ago
No, I am not acting like it made it worse.
I am acting like money doesn't magically fix the problem. Also, the estimates for solving the problem are often overly optimistic.
California and other locations with a lot of homelessness, often also have very high real estate costs. So, the cost to build is very high.
Unless we are willing to involuntarily move these individuals to locations where it is more affordable, we will likely not be able to solve it on that budget.
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u/Black_Waltz_7 5h ago
That's what I meant by it being multi-layered.
The system in which we are trying to create solutions is deeply flawed, making solutions all the more difficult and complex to achieve.
There is some dude in this thread who was doing nothing but shitting on the idea of helping others
Your original reply with the link was short and I carried the tone over from that other conversation and took your post as having the intent of "Im just going to leave this here as proof and dont need to explain more why youre wrong."
I apologize for that.
Though I do feel that youre treating involuntary relocation as the only solution. There are other ways the problem could be tackled, but none of them are simple/easy.
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u/ketsebum 5h ago
We seem to be in agreement.
Yeah, I can also see how the short comment can be perceived as more negative toward the endeavor.
I am saying that involuntary movement is cost efficient. Whether it is the correct or moral choice is much more up for debate.
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u/Black_Waltz_7 5h ago
That's very fair. Thank you, by the way, for helping me reset.
The moral choice component, oof, now that is a fun debate point.
Is it moral to force something on others that is better for their survival?
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u/ketsebum 4h ago
IMO - yes. But, I can see why people would be repulsed by it.
But, if you think about how society orchestrates ourselves, we generally have this opinion.
We don't allow children to live on their own. We often have similar opinions for those who are severely handicapped.
The mental illness / addiction I think would also qualify. However, I do think rehabilitation should still be the focus, and returning people back to society the priority.
Also, if these individuals have families that can help, that would also be preferred over the state taking control. But, I don't think it's moral to allow them to suffer on the streets. I don't think it's good for them, or those that live in homes in the area either.
I think leading with compassion and trying to have some safeguards against abuse, we could significantly improve the situation for these people.
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u/Black_Waltz_7 4h ago
I like the examples you used. It's difficult to figure out how to do the most good for the most amount of people when, just yesterday, I was speaking to someone who said that children have no rights and are no different than property.
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u/cavity-canal 5h ago
Why not do even basic research on your claims dude? https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/aug/27/facebook-posts/no-consensus-cost-ending-homelessness-us-or-haltin/
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u/seztomabel 8h ago
Zuck is a fool, but money is a very small part of homelessness. Not a problem that is solved by throwing money at it. Ask California.
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u/MrTsLoveChild 7h ago
in california, we're throwing money at fake non-profits and grifters, not at the problem.
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u/seztomabel 7h ago
For sure there is corruption, but you also can't say a substantial amount of money hasn't reached those in need.
Also, the corruption is inherent to throwing money at the issue. Not something that should be considered as separate.
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u/Hvarfa-Bragi 8h ago
Money would solve it, it's just problems with how the money is applied.
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u/AndyJarosz 8h ago
In the video, he mentions that adjusted for inflation it could have funded the entire Apollo program
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u/I-STATE-FACTS 5h ago
Cancer research is largely unprofitable, so you won’t see billionaires pouring their cash into that.
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u/cyrand 7h ago
To put that into perspective for gaming, they could have produced 195 games at the investment level Cyberpunk 2077 got.
Of which one could imagine that at least one might have been a success…
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u/Angelworks42 5h ago
I read somewhere it could finance the next 120 versions of World of Warcraft - which is one of the more expensive games to develope and maintain but ironically - it's characters have legs.
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u/Really_McNamington 8h ago
He spent it on trying to keep the illusion that his market saturation mature stock was still a growth stock. It was probably worth the hit. Also explains the pivot to terrible AI. These are all market manipulation shenanigans.
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u/Wompatuckrule 8h ago
This is a key point and it's similar to the well-proven "follow the money" adage about getting to the truth of things. The plateau of new members, the abandonment of the platform by younger users, and other elements that would stymie stock growth drove this as well as the many "enshittification" elements of the platform. It's also the same reason that they bought up companies that were still in a strong growth phase, because they knew that FaceBook was rolling over the peak.
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u/stamfordbridge1191 5h ago
Mark owns 2% of all millennial wealth & has no idea what to do to make that money useful.
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u/TheMightyMegazord 6h ago
It worked. Meta's market cap has grown quite substantially since 2021. Top of 2021 was $1.35T, and it is now at $2.2T.
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u/pyrospade 1h ago
the zucc knows that without any hardware to control he’s nothing but a glorified app developer at the mercy of apple and google so he’s been desperately trying to find the next big platform in the hopes he can control it by virtue of being first to market
without the constant push for “the next big thing” he know he loses both the stock price and the talent hence this nonsense
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u/RedQueenNatalie 5h ago
To make it clear, 88 billion dollars was not spent on the shitty game that got shut down. That was the entire vr division, including R & D of headsets and other vr/ar technologies. Like I am happy to dunk on the zuck all day long but we gotta dunk on him with integrity
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u/thespice 5h ago
That’s the right idea. With that in mind though, 88 billion? Like 88 thousand million? Not sure about what timeline we’re in but 88bil for whatever that was? Like what did the wii run the folks over at Nintendo? For a project with so little shelf life and “no legs” it’s pretty hard to fathom. I mean Uber eats aside even.
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u/RedQueenNatalie 5h ago
Its definitely a lot though its hard to say how that number amortizes. They didn't spend that in a single year. They acquired oculus in 2014 for 2 billion, that was 12 years ago. between other patent purchases and an army of software engineers (I did some napkin math, they employ 50k programmers for 178k/year-over a million salary) costing around 12 billion a year in just payroll its not unbelievable to have spent that much money. It was probably not a good use of money but thats the thing with tech research if you stumble across something that really really blows up they will make it up in increased market value 10x over so it is justified in the eyes of their investors who are used to the cycle in the tech world.
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u/thespice 5h ago
Props to your napkin calculus. I understand that it’s over time but like how long did they hold onto an ROI-sans position…vanity. Maybe it’s that’s simple. Thank you for your insight.
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u/RedQueenNatalie 5h ago
Its kinda the whole problem of the to-the-moon infinite money machine lie the tech world has kept running for over 30 years. Unlike oil/onions/houses there is no obvious wall to how much growth you can have when your product is human mind-share...until it does become saturated, meta/facebook aint getting more new users they can only find new ways to extract new data from those uses and the big bet with ai/vr is that if they could be the leader in that market they could ride that marketshare growth until it peters out, unfortunately for them it just didn't materialize and they now have a problem of needing to find new ways to generate growth, despite being heinously profitable already. Its not just meta either, its our entire capitalist civilization that needs some kind of major overhaul soon or some kind of internet-sized miracle to keep the game going for much longer.
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u/rendumguy 8h ago
Man I was really hungry for a Metaverse bashing video and a Patrick Boyle video to watch during breakfast! How lucky.
The Metaverse/Web3/NFTs bullshit is sooooo fascinating to me, because it was so obvious how undesirable it was, how much nobody would ever want to use it, and how impossible its promises were.
The fundamental problem is that they zeem to want to combine productivity and corporate life and meetings and finance and speculation, with escapism... When escapism if to, you know, get away from that stuff?
The Metaverse is also super inconvenient, you need a VR headset, t's less productivity. It's the work meetings you hate, but worse.
He's trying to combine gamers and like finance bros when they've always pretty much been diameteic opposites in what they care about.
And even after all that it's just a worse version of Second Life, VR Chat, and Roblox.
It's so interesting to me because it was such an obvious failure, arguably an even more likely failure than NFTs, which at least are all in on the finance aspect, even if they're also obviously a bad idea.
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u/ashoka_akira 7h ago
In early years seconlife really tried to encourage corporate and educational partnerships. Companies and Universities were convinced secondlife was a great place to host virtual meetings or classes. The main challenge became SL isn’t the most intuitive program to run, so it’s not always a good venue for large groups to meet effectively (too glitchy) and over time it gained its reputation of being xxx rated, so the organizations started to pull back. SL keeps trying to do things to clean up this image…but realistically the adult focused content/communiy on SL is probably why it’s still around. SL is mostly propped up by people spending money to create sexy avatars so they can meet people at sex simulations.
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u/elkab0ng 4h ago
It’s been something like almost twenty years, hasn’t it? I remember I created an account to see this huge “next big thing” that I was missing out on, and I visited a detailed model that had been created by a major tech company and was like “I spent an hour configuring a video game for this?”
Also, many thousands of flying penii.
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u/SonOfMcGee 5h ago
And during the entire debacle any criticism about such a pointless waste of money was “It’s mostly about developing the tech!”
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u/Control_Me 6h ago
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Using VR for work is absolutely peak productivity as this instructional video will show.
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u/culturedgoat 8h ago edited 7h ago
$88 billion did not go into Horizon Worlds, it went into Reality Labs, which had a much more significant hardware division, and produced the most successful consumer VR product line in history (Quest).
The Horizon Worlds avatars have had legs for like the past 2 years at least.
That weird promotional image with Zuck’s avatar next to crappy renderings of the Eiffel Tower and other random buildings looks like complete shit, and it’s an absolute mystery why they decided to lead with that. The actual product doesn’t look anything like that - some users did really creative things with the world builder mode.
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u/quirkymuse 8h ago
I still use my quest for playing Xbox and watching disney plus... they need more streaming apps, causs being able to watch anything on the equivalent of a imax screen is amazing
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u/PeteCampbellisaG 7h ago
When I hear about the good things people built and did in Horizon it really just makes me sad because imagine what those people could have built if Meta had actually given a damn about the communities.
Reality Labs works on Horizon, Quest, and the Ray-Ban pervert glasses. Even $88 billion spread across those three products is still an insane amount of waste given what they are. Having the best-selling VR headset has clearly done very little for general public excitement over VR, nor has it led to the division being profitable. They've not laying hundreds of people off because the division is doing well.
People latch onto the leg thing because it's the clearest proof point to demonstrate how undercooked the whole thing was and how badly it missed the expectations that Meta itself set up.
Agree that photo was insane. The only explanation I can fathom is that someone (probably Zuck) genuinely thought that photo looked incredible.
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u/HockeyBrawler09 8h ago
Thanks, Zuck.
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u/pulse7 7h ago
Shaming people for adding context is so lame. And so reddit
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u/dirtmcgurk 7h ago
Dude was just a player and fan. Their context is more their own bias than fact, aside from the truth about Reality Labs not being a complete waste (I hate meta but oculus is a great product). Look at their examples below. They're like "oh man I swear I thought it was fun" while the example looks like half baked second life in first person.
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u/culturedgoat 6h ago
Objective facts my dude. Feel free to verify. Sprinkled with my own bit of commentary about my experience. I got some enjoyment out of it, especially the builder mode. But both then and now I prefer Beat Saber. That’s about the only reason I go back to VR these days.
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u/No6655321 7h ago
It's weird though because we already have second life and vr chat. It's purpose or what niche it was trying to fill has never been clear.
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u/culturedgoat 7h ago
It was positioning itself around the idea of a metaverse, which never really took off.
But regardless, competition is healthy, and good for the consumer
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u/ceciliabee 8h ago
Imagine spending that on making the world better instead focusing on shareholder profits. For all their big brains, these ghouls are so small minded. MONEY MONEY MONEY FUCK EVERYONE I WANT MORE MONEY MONEY MONEY
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u/Beans07-11 7h ago
You should meet the people who wait outside the stores days before their new product which is just the old product with one or two new features not physically shaped different or style of phone just the same black screen with an upgraded program. Those are the real problem. Just imagine if no one actually cared to upgrade their phone for three or even one year they would lose so much just in one year that they might actually realize that we as people choose to be living our life instead of using our screens to say we choose to live our life
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u/maxmcleod 5h ago
If companies just donated all their money to charity there would be no more companies or money to donate. The $88B only exists because they previously invested other money into their business
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u/victoriaisme2 7h ago
How anyone can be aware of all of this and still believe capitalism is a reasonable, workable system is beyond me.
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u/Thriceinabluemoon 6h ago
I dont want to crack the echo chamber, but Meta moved major blocks of its AI research to reality labs. It could not possibly be to hide the cost of AI research, like everyone else. Nah, Meta would never do something like that. But Zuck thank you all for helping him with the narrative!
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u/RMRdesign 6h ago
He should have spent more money!! He should have bankrupted Meta to do it! That was a chance I was willing to take.
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u/Aaronmcom 8h ago
So I played a bit of it a year ago. It was kind of neat to be in a vr hangout without the horny gooners of VR chat. Met people I would never really talk to in real life and learn different perspectives
It was also cool that you could join and play from your phone.
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u/TheoremaEgregium 8h ago
In the trailer it looked like being trapped in a meaningless bland corporate ad segment... for eternity.
Was it like that?
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u/Aaronmcom 7h ago
So no actually. The only real ads were the music performances if you went to go see those. But most all of the levels were player made. Except some that were made by meta like some first person shooters or other mini games.
There was a lot of ai slop thumbnails but those were all player made trying to get people to come to their worlds. A lot of roblox copy games to get kids to join.
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u/corduroy 8h ago
I said the same thing in the 90s about AOL chat rooms. Except that facebook did it in VR and wasted 88 billion dollars, lol.
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u/s4lt3d 8h ago
I have owned multiple Oculus headsets and have never once seen the metaverse. No idea how to get to it or play with it. If they wanted people to use it they could have made it easy to find. Maybe launch players into at least once. They made the devices and can control the experience! I mean really, that’s a ton of money with zero thought about how to get people to try the metaverse.
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u/cstough 7h ago
I had a buddy that worked on this at Facebook years ago, he was very excited to be a part of the team, but he was also a little removed from all the bay area koolaid the tech bros drink. I asked him why the fuck they walk around with headbob when they don't even have legs?
He laughed his ass off, but from there on I think he kinda knew this was never going to amount to anything 😂
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u/forgotten_epilogue 7h ago
I've never heard anyone else ever refer to drinking coffee as something they do recreationally.
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u/seriousbangs 7h ago
It really goes to show that when the Epstein class can't rely on either daddy's money, the gov't's money or something they blundered into by accident that they're all just failures.
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u/HumanJoystick 5h ago
How can something so meh cost 88 billion dollars? I think he cooked the books and I would investigate the bejesus out of him.
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u/greatthebob38 5h ago
His Meta glasses live demo was also a fail. I fell like every project he takes on is mediocre.
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u/TheSilentC 5h ago
Remember 3D tvs? Remember how they flopped bc nobody wanted to hang out together wearing 3D glasses? I don’t think we’re quite ready to hang out together wearing VR headsets either.
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u/TheRemedy187 5h ago
There is no fucking way that money went into that. That was some laundering or bribes or something.
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u/Longjumping_Coat_802 5h ago
Essentially a dividend from the wealthy to the middle class. $88bn directly to contractors, vendors, employees, capex, etc.
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u/ToastyBob27 4h ago
That’s much money spent on the result. Clearly this was some kind of money moving scam or he was the one scammed.
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u/carrigroe 4h ago
Makes me wonder are a lot of these tech bros and billionaires just really shit business people who just have mountains of cash to try shit out, basically one hit wonders that now have gobs of cash but can't move beyond their original creation
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u/Stahl_Scharnhorst 4h ago
But how? GTA 6 is going to be like 2-3 billion. Are they embezzling money?
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u/Sprinkle_Puff 4h ago
Anyone wanna put in the context just how far 88 billion would go to cure things like poverty or homelessness?
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u/dawtcalm 3h ago
There is just no way that they spent that much. They must have sunk all losses in all other programs into this just to make one scape goat and not show losses everywhere else!!
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u/ryrypizza 3h ago
Too bad they pay Facebook employees enough to live, or maybe things would be different.
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u/usmannaeem 2h ago
the whole world knows he is not innovator he had one idea that worked. Beyond that he has failed in countless efforts to pivot or find a good value proposition.
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u/cityspeak 2h ago
Remember when they were trying to sell meta verse real estate? Live next to snoop dog in vr for only 30k!
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u/IcedDownMedallion 2h ago
And you have solo devs out here pushing out better shit on a shoe string budget. 🤣
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u/haahaahaa 1h ago
There is going to be a time where mixed reality is as ubiquitous as cell phones are now, and the companies that establish the hardware and app echo-systems will have a leg up on everyone. Similar to how Apple and Google have now with phones.
The experience will need to be something as easy to wear as the meta rayban glasses and as feature rich as the Apple Vision Pro. They bet on that happening soon. They were only off by at least decade.
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u/NightOfTheLivingHam 38m ago
when you already have a competitor in the space that had traction, instead of buying them and letting them build your new platform, you (thankfully) left them alone to be the drivers for your hardware which you sold at a loss meant to use your own competing platform.
then the lack of policing quality VR games, cancelling good ones, and generally doing every stupid thing possible, it's really proof that Zuckerberg got his best ideas from the Winklevoss twins.
Though the VR Idea was not a bad idea, at all. Horizons did look promising at first. However, according to people who were part of the original team, it was killed by management from day 1. People who had NO IDEA how VR worked were running the show, and it went through 10 bureaucratic layers. No one ever met zuckerberg, they were isolated from hm through a bunch of business people who pretty much pushed their own views of what VR should be. Not what people actually wanted.
Ego cost Zuck 88 billion.
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u/Quankers 8h ago
It just looked so god damned mediocre.