Meta employees, blink once if you need help

Meta’s identity crisis might just signal the end of an era. (Screenshot from Reality Labs)

Zuckerberg is so bent on building the metaverse that it's "the only thing Mark wants to talk about," according to a former director-level Meta employee. 

The company is "messaging the hell out of" the new focus, "spinning up teams that are metaverse specific," including one that will reach across all groups within the company and be tasked with letting people know "there is a metaverse playbook," the ex-director told Business Insider in their series of interviews with former and current employees.

But if there is a playbook, it's a mystery to employees. Meta's commerce team, a hot division within the company, explicitly told employees that it wasn't planning to invest in any metaverse projectsuntil at least 2023.
"People don't really seem to know what to deliver or what to work on because there is still no coherent strategy," a current employee said. "It's basically fomenting disorganization and anxiety."

​​The metaverse effort is ramping up after reporting the tech platform’s first ever quarterly decline in active users earlier this year, on top of losing $10 billion last year on its Reality Labs segment that handles metaverse projects.

It intends to spend that much this year, too, and possibly for many years to come—despite holding the record for the largest one-day stock drop that wiped $230 billion off of its market capitalization.

Zuckerberg has aggressively pushed for the company’s employees to embrace the new vision—revealing in February that workers would be known as “Metamates” rather than “Facebookers” in a post on his public Facebook account. Meta has also toyed with various concepts for the virtual world,  including the digital currency “Zuck Bucks.” 

Unless you count buzzwords, there's little to show for so much money spent, according to another employee who recently left. "There's still not much to touch or look at, much less use," the person said, "for all of its metaverse proclamations."

Zuckerberg has said the metaverse is a long-term project that won't be fully developed for a decade or more. During Facebook’s rebranding, he once said, “Now is the right time to update our values and our cultural operating system.”

But this pivot may just be what kills it, Facebook is on a Yahoo-like cliff. Insiders and investors fear Mark Zuckerberg's 'metaverse' pivot is an identity crisis they won't recover from. It's possible the social-media company may never be as dominant as it once was.

Yahoo was the go-to for internet search in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It came undone by emerging rivals capturing new users, a sluggish response to changes in digital advertising, and the second coming of the internet, Web 2.0. 

And now, maybe Facebook has come to die after its first real competitor in TikTok—with a track record of scandals, whistleblowers, and politicians calling for regulation slowing acquisitions—a disruptive privacy update on digital ads, and an explosion of Web3 startups and technology. Other red flags are Facebook's exodus of high-level talent and an inability to maintain good relationships with partners, like Apple and Google.

Just as getting rid of Yahoo avatars was the finishing blow, the metaverse really could be Facebook’s.