[stephc_int13]

So, 34.5 Billions!?

I was still on the 10B figure. At this rate they are going to reach 50B pretty soon.

What is the limit? 100B?

I understand why this is taking time, R&D and stuff, but I have some difficulties to understand how they manage to burn that much money.

[colinmhayes]

The only limit is Mark. And he's not showing any signs of slowing down, the earnings report even said they're going to lose even more money on reality labs next year than they did this year.

[forgetme2020]

Cost controls at Meta are atleast 2 orders of magnitude less than any similar company. I've worked at a few FAANGS now and the controls are really low in every dimension. I fear that when the finally start acting it will be a lot more severe due to the need to catch up.

[nicce]

When you have too much money, you start forgetting how to optimise and control its use.

[skippyboxedhero]

I wouldn't imagine they even have the capacity to do so.

An ecomm company in the UK went bust today, Made.com. They had a decent business, they sold furniture online, but their main issue was cost. All obvious, they had hundreds of people working in single divisions, it made no sense at all.

But they never attempted to cut cost until it was too late. I have seen this before, and it isn't "forgetting"...it is a physical capacity. You hired the 32-year old guy, he has only ever hired people, and you tell him he needs to fire 10% next week...he will start ducking you, what do you do? You can't fire him now, you need him to fire everyone else...most companies can't turn it around in time (Made was also run by people like the 32-year old, "entrepreneurs", everything will turn around soon).

[stephc_int13]

I am pretty sure that many employees and contractors are getting rich in the process. Good for them, I guess.

[foobarian]

I hope people don't confuse the English billion (10^9) with the billion in some other countries (10^12) where they use "milliard" or similar for 10^9.

[profstasiak]

I think everyone with English as Second Language got used to that difference. Especially in startup world, or country economics billion is an often mentioned quantity of money

[ferrocarraiges]

I often wonder why people don't use SI prefixes for money.

We could say that they've spent on the order of 10 gigadollars.

[selfmodruntime]

I really like the idea of using gigadollars in daily conversations.

[brutusborn]

I've never seen anything but 10^9 used for billions in the modern era, although it is in some >100 y.o. text books. Have you seen 10^12 in the wild lately?

[mendigou]

Everywhere in Europe. Every European language other than English (that I know of) uses "billions" for 10^12 and something like "milliards" or "thousands of millions" for 10^9.

[foobarian]

And to make things worse all the names after million are offset. Trillion, quadrillion, etc.

[trafficante]

There’s R&D on a whole host of things - ranging from optics to battery life to designing silicon. There’s also all the software/gaming studio acquisitions made over the past few years. And, I suspect, they were bleeding cash like crazy on the Quest 2 subsidy and not recouping nearly enough via Oculus Store purchases.

What’s more baffling to me is that we’re now several years into this “bet the company” XR pivot and nothing really seems to be coming to fruition. Yes they sold a TON of Quest 2s - via a financially ruinous subsidy and then everyone tossed the device in the back of their closet.

They’ve spent a ton of money buying every successful VR game studio they could get their hands on for three years - and still have NOTHING but a handful of BeatSaber music packs to show for it.

The Quest Pro was supposed to be positioned as a less expensive HoloLens for businesses while also getting Meta some real world experience with eye/face tracking. Thing is: the original device was supposed to have a depth sensor and it got removed at the 11th hour. Which, imo, completely ruined the HoloLens-lite positioning since the only AR differentiators over the Quest 2 ended up being slightly upgraded SLAM cameras and a janky color overlay. All the meatspace positioning had to be offloaded to an already over-worked Qualcomm SoC. And without those advanced AR capabilities, the Quest Pro is essentially an upmarket blend of the Quest 2 and the Pico 4.

Which leaves the Quest 3. And we’ve seen enough of it from leaks to know it’s actually a compelling upgrade to the 2 - but it’s not expected to launch until 12 months from now. And it’s certainly not representative of what you’d expect from xxx billion dollars worth of hardware R&D.

This comment is already too long so I’m not getting into the Metaverse thing, but it’s probably the biggest failure of them all.

Tl;Dr: Imagine if Google launched Stadia along with an announcement that they were pivoting to the console market. Meta’s VR pivot is ALMOST at that same level of a self-inflicted mismanaged disaster.