One of the most expensive bets in corporate history just collapsed. Meta spent $80 billion building a world that almost nobody wanted to live in. It started in 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg renamed his entire company after a concept from a science fiction novel. He told the world virtual reality would replace the internet. He was wrong. This week, Meta officially announced it is shutting down Horizon Worlds on VR headsets, the platform meant to be the foundation of the metaverse. June 15 is the date it dies on Quest devices. To understand the scale of this failure, consider what $80 billion could have bought. Instead, it built a cartoon world where Zuckerberg’s avatar famously had no legs. Reality Labs lost $19.1 billion in 2025 alone. In Q4, it pulled in $955 million in revenue against a $6 billion loss. That is a 6-to-1 burn ratio. Earlier this year, Meta killed the work version of the metaverse, closed three VR game studios, and laid off over 1,000 Reality Labs employees. Each announcement was framed as a “strategic shift.” Taken together, they tell a different story. Users never showed up, retention was catastrophic almost from day one. ...