Kurt Wagner

yes so this is an annual thing right looking ahead to 2026 budgets uh in this case mark zuckerberg has a nice home in hawaii where they have a series of meetings executives come in in the month of november and to your point they talk about this year 10 cuts sort of across the board looking at uh all the different teams but that the metaverse has been asked to cut much more deeply than that

As much as 30% is currently being discussed, I should point out it hasn't been decided yet, but a cut of 30% would certainly also come with layoffs.

So to your point, this is an effort that Mark Zuckerberg has touted as being the future of the company for years.

So it's a pretty meaningful change there.

That's right.

And the virtual worlds aren't going away, to be clear.

It's still going to be something that they invest in, just not quite as aggressively as they had.

And what was explained to me by sources this week is that part of that is that the market has not really materialized.

You know, I think they originally

spent a lot of money building out this metaverse group thinking that they would have competition from others in the industry rushing towards a metaverse like product as well.

That has not happened.

And so it's not necessarily that Mark Zuckerberg no longer believes in this.

I'm told that he still does.

But clearly they have overspent to try to build this thing.

And I think the ultimate goal is to get to these, you know, AI inspired glasses and AR glasses.

And maybe the metaverse was a stepping stone to that all the way.

They are not giving up on hardware.

The VR virtual reality group is expected to be hit by these metaverse cuts.

That is the immersive metaverse product.

But they are still investing in AI glasses, the Ray Bans that you mentioned, Ed.