If a company can dump $100B into failed project and still be profitable they have too much money. Jesus, imagine would would happen if this money went to the workers instead...
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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It's actually crazy that you can burn $100B in a project that everybody mocked from the beginnings and still be CEO after that while having earned billions in compensation
Hell, it’s fucking insane that we have to earn our bonuses and they still fucking suck yet these people will get millions after fucking it all up. Imagine if a regular worker failed this hard and was like “so where’s my $15,000 Christmas bonus?”
I didn't fuck up and only got a tenth of that.
You guys are getting Christmas bonuses?
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this is what's called "holding a controlling interest."
imagine would would happen if this money went to the workers instead...
where do you think the money went? I imagine a lot of it went to workers salaries....
[sweating profusely] Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!
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imagine would would happen if this money went to the workers instead
imagine if they used it develop poor countries
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Lol at all the companies who got rugpulled again because they trusted Zuck's promises. Get rekt bozos.
I guess the idea just didn't have legs!
Great News!
Nobody should use or support anything Meta. As a matter if principle.
The whole concept was dead on arrival. Second Life never took off and it was perplexing to see that Meta thought it could make it work.
I mean - it kind of does work. There are millions of people socializing in online games. Playing World of Warcraft with their friends or people they met there. Building crazy things on a Minecraft server while forming friendships. Playing on that Counterstrike Server for decades with the same people. Forming that guild or that clan in an MMORPG. There is something that does work. Not sure why Zuckerberg wanted VR to be part of that and that Facebook touch of poo is also not helping, but trying to build "World of Warcraft for your aunt" is not the worst idea.
Games have something to do with socialization as an extra benefit.
The meta shit was conceived of as 3d advertising with socialization as an extra benefit.
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Yeah, but I mean there's "you shouldn't use this because Meta is bad" and then there's "no one wants to use this because it is, on a fundamental level, an incredibly stupid idea and I can't believe anyone thought this would ever catch on."
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Over $100 billion down the toilet and zuck is still one of the richest people in the world wtf?
The US economy has devolved from an economy where you gain money by making and selling things to an economy where investing in the stock market and then taking out loans on that stock to keep investing is a better way to keep making money. When was the last time someone rich became poor?
That is one of the ways they avoid taxes. They take out loans to pay old loans and to spend on the value of their investments at good rates, and since they never realize income they never pay taxes. I think interest is even tax deductible to a degree.
Bezos in 2020, a year his wealth multiplied obscenely, paid 600 dollars. Less than we did.
As per a couple of propublica articles they published around 2021.
Dang, I pay more in taxes in a single paycheck than bezos did in a year.
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Trillion is the new Billion.
100 billion must be in lost market capitalization, not real money, just like tesla is theoretically worth a trillion dollars, no one could recognize that money.
100 billion is a touch higher than I've read elsewhere, but evidently they actually spent $77 billion 'real' dollars:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-threw-77-billion-143014208.html
Good god I figured it must have been wrong as it's such a large amount of money. I wonder how much of that they borrowed and how much they paid in cash. They might be paying astronomical interest payments on all of that.
Just goes to show how we have all the wrong people in charge in the west, at every level from government to business from the ceo on down to middle managers. Zuck is case and point. Well, as someone else posted, this article about their failure has legs. Unlike his stupid metaverse, that no one seemed even slightly interested in from the start.
Yeah, they bought a modest, niche product with a likely viable business case, and then bet they could make it an everyman's device for all their socializing and experiencing events like sports and music....
The people that actually wanted the device got to take a back seat to them chasing non-existent markets for it... Their aspirations so impossibly high that a niche device could no longer justify itself against the money spent chasing that non-existant market.. So something that should have been for some VR nerds to be happy and sustain the business while the rest of the world shrugs and say 'I don't get it' becomes an 'Obviously this is a failure of a concept and no one should bother doing this'.
Classic case of yes men-ism. Everyone around zuck tells him he's the greatest, smartest, infallible. He likely removed anyone from his life that was willing to tell him he was wrong. He is making money hand over fist, and believes it, he's special, the laser light of all knowledge shines out of his ass, don't look directly at it or you can go blind. So he gets an idea, tells his people how he thinks everyone could get into it, they all heartily agree, what a great idea zuck!
I bet if anyone did tell him it wasn't, he fired or removed them from his life, and still hasn't apologized or made amends about it too, and instead doesn't hold any sort of grudge against the people that told him he was right despite knowing better and being too craven to tell the truth.
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If they can burn a billion dollars on shit everyone else knew was a failure from day 1, they can pay a fucking reasonable tax rate
This is a good reason not to let Jeff Bezos convince you that computer saas is a good idea.
Rent seeking. Landlords are leeches.
I was struggling to think where i recognized that bit was but you just solved that. They want rent, never for you to own anything, much less anything tangible that cant be taken away or revoked or forced to surrender or relinquish
Appl does the same with music and videos and audiobooks and books They want to license it to you and for you to have zero access to the actual files and brainwash entire ongoing new generations to not even understand a file system/owning real files and knowing where to get basically any file you want. The whole notion of a file having tangible value and operable
Go Valve go. Screw Facebook/Meta, Google, Apple. I want the future of VR to be standard desktop Linux centric. The iOS/Android state of mobile is annoyingly restrictive compared to even Windows let alone desktop/server Linux
One more piece of bad news for VR
VR is doing fine. It's a niche hobby for people like myself to feel like you're inside of a game, movie, or porn. If you're someone who does work on your own device, you can even work in VR.
The metaverse was a ridiculous idea, that is beaten by VRChat.
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But this time it will be totally different! They'll learn to love our AI slop! Trust me, bro!
But what about the zero people who used it? Whatever will they do?
Don’t worry. The billions Zuck dumped into crypto and NFTs will pay for the billions he dumped into VR.
He’s a genius, dontchaknow.
Meta Horizon Worlds is a giant unlicensed and unmoderated daycare.
So there are people parking their toddlers in a VR world?
The overwhelming majority of vr world users are children ages 7-14. There are almost no adults. The adults that are there are trying to interact with kids in an environment where there is zero supervision.
There's a lot of VR chat communities that heavily self moderate that crap out so adults can actually enjoy games/social instances. This approach created a whooooole lotta Wild West space full of every IP stealing debauchery you can imagine, but like the early Internet also allowed for a ton of creativity and fun. Meta's approach was to try to simply not allow anything that would be inappropriate for anyone ever to sanitize for corporate sponsors, leading to a sterile and soulless waste of time.
Utterly shocked which one has regular users creating and exploring.
Fun aside but I went into one of these heavily moderated adult communities on Meta and I was using a headset that was enterprise controlled so it had no personal meta account attached which meant I didn’t have an avatar.
When I showed up I appeared as a featureless grey avatar. I made a lot of friends until the moderator with a heavy southern US accent called me a hacker (because I was grey and featureless) and started genuinely freaking out and yelling.
A whole crowd gathered around me and some people were saying that I was a government agent (lol) and another suggested I was Russian. Anyways, they banned me for 7 days which sucked.
I went through a VR witch hunt because I was GREY.
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