Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Saying Much About Facebook These Days
The Meta CEO is ignoring his social network to focus on luring newcomers to a mostly vacant virtual world.
The best thing you could say about Mark Zuckerberg’s flailing attempt to sell the world on his grand visions of the future is that he’s trying. On Oct. 11, Zuckerberg hosted a promotional “event” in which a few thousand software developers, journalists, and Meta employees simultaneously logged in to the company’s virtual world to watch him and his deputies appear as animated avatars while offering tech prognostications that ranged from inscrutable to deeply depressing.
Expectations had been low for Meta Platforms Inc. (aka Facebook) going into Connect 2022, the company’s annual event for developers of software for virtual and augmented reality headsets. In a business where users are measured in multiples of a billion, Facebook’s flagship VR app, Horizon Worlds, had about 300,000 users as of February, around the same time the company aired a Super Bowl ad to promote it. That figure appears to have dropped to less than 200,000 since then, despite an expensive marketing effort and an appearance by Zuckerberg on one of the world’s most popular podcasts.